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Have PCs basically hit the saturation point in the market...?

MadRat

MadRat

Lifer
Do you believe the market is now saturated with personal computers? Its rare anymore I hear of anyone running out and buying a new machine although people obviously are still doing it based on the latest numbers. Prices are so much lower for so much more power than ever before it makes me wonder why the old PCs are still running. Could it simply be most people do not want anymore power than what is already in the market place?? Perhaps the market is still raw for sales but the PC has simply fallen out of fashion with the media?? Who knows. Share your opinions!
 
most people do not want anymore power than what is already in the market place??
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You answered your own question. There was a time when people needed more power for word processing. I remember those days. They're long gone now. Most people just use their computers for email, web, mp3, photos, and the occassional document.

But the market is growing big time over in asia. They account for 40% of intels sales now. And India is exploding.
 
I don't like how the poll is worded. I believe the industry has hit a "temporary saturation point" because of several factors... economy and "the digital divide" have a lot to do with it.
 
Most people don't need more power than what they have. The latest expansion of PCs was the..hmm... (how do I put this delicately?) Gateway's targeted demographic. People who expect a PC to be an appliance. People who call tech support because they want to be walked through burning a CD. People who learned to do a few things on the PC, but that meant that they now know how to use one, they have one, so they don't feel so out of the loop or behind the times. These people are not learning to use new features or applications that would make them need the power of newer machines.

Of course, MS will drive it's own market some, when Longhorn comes out, requiring people to upgrade from their TNT2 Ultra or older integrated video... That'll kind of feed itself for a bit. Bob goes over to the Jones', sees their new spiffy PC running a 3D OS and wants to upgrade, goes out to buy the OS, then finds out that his 3 year old PC with integrated graphics won't run it (of course, he'll only learn this after he buys it and takes it home), then go back to the store that'll sell him a video card, go back home to find that he doesn't have an AGP slot, gives up and buys a new machine.

 
Originally posted by: MasterHoss
I don't like how the poll is worded. I believe the industry has hit a "temporary saturation point" because of several factors... economy and "the digital divide" have a lot to do with it.
Click to expand...

PM me suggestions. 😉
 
My parents make a good example.

They had a K6-III 400 MHz based box with 128 MB of SDRAM once upon a time.
It used to run Win98, but since Win9x is utter crap, an upgrade to Win2K was done, and Win2K, as well as some other relatively new apps did run a little slow.

So I upgraded their box with a TUSL2, Tualeron 1.3 GHz, and another 128 MB of RAM, it's been running like that for...a long time 🙂
I have a hard time seeing anything that would make them wanna upgrade.

A 3D OS is definately not a good reason for them, what are they gonna do with that? They wanna surf, write mails, use OpenOffice, etc, not sit a stare at the fancy UI.
Besides, they're used to Win2K, and it's a good enough OS.

When computers where in their infancy, they had alot of problems, poor OS's unless you shelled out for a RISC workstation, slow hardware, bad(or no) UI's, etc.
These days, they don't suffer from that, they're "good enough" for anything my parents wanna do.
 
I know a bunch of people getting dells to replace old devil machines or adding machines for the kids plus getting home wireless networks. I have seen more buying in the last few months
 
maybe in the US and Western Europe, but Asia and Africa still have a low computer penetration rate
 
I've on my 3rd different machine in less than a year. To tell you the truth the only reason I needed a faster PC was because of Games!!

My machine early summer 2002

P2-350mhz 192MB ram Win98 8 gig HD Geforce MX2 400

This machine would still be fine today other than playing games. But for word processing, internet surfing and email it is enough.

My machine later summer 2002-early summer 2003

Celeron 1.3ghz 512MB ram Win98SE 40 gig HD Ti4200

Again same as above

Current machine

P4 2.8C 1024MB pc3200 dual channel Ti4200

Again if I was surfing the web I would not notice much difference between this machine and the 350mhz. The only reason I upgrade is for games. The hardware manufacturers should thank the game industry for a lot of new sales.
 

A couple years ago just before the dot-com bubble ton's of "average" users bought PCs trying to jump on the internet. Tons of PCs were sold with that "$400 off if you sign up for my internet" deal.

I would say we hit the saturation point about two-three years ago. With that in mind I believe we are very close to seeing a rash of new PCs being sold as even the average user figures out it's time to upgrade.
 
I think it is temporary. I think this is a perfect time for non-power users to get a great premade system for a low price and that is a nice thing. I think this has turned buying computers, for most, into a brainless exercise since a lot of factors no longer exist (usually how to skimp an extra dollar versus performance).

But for power-users, I think this is just a slump. There would or should be another hit sometime soon where new technology has a big enough jump to concern every power user and people will start talking about which is better / etc. Stuff like Serial ATA should ramp up and create more of a debate between SCSI (I hope). New games coming out should push hardware to its limits, although I am not sure if doom3 / halflife2 will do this, I hope some game does. LDC screens are slowly attacking the gamer market, in that they are finally delivering refresh rates required by most, hopefully in the near future, they will start to overtake the majority of CRT users and this will probably spark some debates.

So yea, I think it is a slow time with a lot on the horizon. I don't think PCs will ever truly hit a saturation point until bandwith is eyons beyond what it is now. IE: ethernet jacks become as standard as power connectors in houses / every home has one.

Hope I answered the question right, I sort of went off on a tangent.
 
Originally posted by: Smilin
A couple years ago just before the dot-com bubble ton's of "average" users bought PCs trying to jump on the internet. Tons of PCs were sold with that "$400 off if you sign up for my internet" deal.

I would say we hit the saturation point about two-three years ago. With that in mind I believe we are very close to seeing a rash of new PCs being sold as even the average user figures out it's time to upgrade.
Click to expand...

The only real PC sales are to businesses or homes where their 486 or P75 is finally not enough anymore, or their lack of USB finally catches up with them. (USB is very, very big these days... cameras, printers, scanners... you name it.)
 
Originally posted by: bluemax
The only real PC sales are to businesses or homes where their 486 or P75 is finally not enough anymore, or their lack of USB finally catches up with them. (USB is very, very big these days... cameras, printers, scanners... you name it.)
Click to expand...

Actually, I would say anything under 64MB of ram / 300 MHZ. Any company that is considering going to 2K / XP is looking at new hardware. I agree that USB has become more and more important.
 
So far the "PC market=satured" theory is ahead. Looks like the basic consensus of the majority is that CPU's are mucho speed and there just isn't a gee-whiz app out there.

I personally dropped out of the upgrade market when AT's participation in the RC5-64 project ended.
 
I think it's temporary - new apps need to come out to push the top-of-the-line hardware. Once we start looking at more intelligent PC's, like with DECENT voice recognition capability, then we're going to need some serious hardware for voice and speech analysis in realtime. Sure, we can probably do voice analysis right now, but you'd ask the PC a question, speaking normally, then it would analyze the recorded speech for an hour or so until it could very accurately determine what you meant, and what you are looking to hear.
Or maybe a 3D Operating system, with VR gloves or sensors of some sort to be used to navigate it. That'd be cool.😀
 
I imagine the next surge in sales will be when the 64 bit processors meet the new Longhorn O/S. Both will be cutting edge still.
 
With the price of an entry level PC being so affordable to the general public, the average home users are more likely to buy a new system than fussing with upgrades when the old computer is no longer adequate, hardware failure or software problems the user cannot solve. A $350-$500 PC is affordable enough that non-technical people would be willing to shell out to replace their old clunker. Imagine yourself with a used car that has some minor problems and you are the type that let the dealor service everything including oil changes. All of a sudden the price for a new econo car drops from $13K to $3K. You would most likely get a new car every 2 years, when minor problems start poping up.

- Aris
 
There's plenty of room in the market, fully half the people I know still don't own a PC and of those who do, 80% don't know how to do much more than email and browse the net. Invariably, when they see my HTPC, PC recording studio, digital camera, DV editing, gaming, ect..they always say...man, I gotta get one of those, that is sweet, because their present PC isn't capable.
 
Temporary slump, but surely today there are fewer reasons to upgrade to the latest and greatest. They just don't need that much power to accomplish the tasks most relevant to them.

As cheap as PCs can be, I still think there is a price barrier. Even $400 is a lot of money, really. It might not seem a lot to some of the folks here getting $400 graphics cards every 6 months or so, but they're hardly average buyers. Also, computers are STILL giant tire-sized boxes that expect you to attune to them, not the other way around. There is an intimidation factor preventing grandma from getting close to the system because she's afraid she'll break it if she pushes the wrong button.

It's funny, as much as computers have advanced in the last 20 years, in some aspects they have barely advanced at all.
 
I agree with most ppl here. it's PC is quite saturated in the US. but the market in asia is growing fast.

Countries where most ppl already have PCs, like in the US and in Europe, the market for PC will slow down, but there'll be plenty of growth in the mobile/laptop market instead.

I for one, dunt think i need to upgrade my PC for a while (last upgrade was almost ayear already), and i'm currently looking around for a good deal on a centrino laptop.
 
Until I started doing some vid capture/encoding a faw weeks back, I haven't had to upgrade for a while. Now: 160 gb/8mb HDD, DVD+RW etc, and the CPO is next.

New things later should push the market more.
 
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