How many years before BestBuy and Staples stop carrying desktops?

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious what some of your predictions might be.

I can't imagine that they sell many desktops. OTOH, my local Walmart's shelves where they have the Acer and whatnot desktops always seem to be partially empty. (And most of the laptops always seem to be sold out. Are there ebay scalpers buying all of them?)

I know that some "gamers" might buy a higher-end desktop at BestBuy. (A distant friend of mine did, and then gamed on the iGPU. Bizarre, I know.)

Note that I'm specifically referring to the larger ATX desktop towers, as well as SFF/slim towers, and not Brix / NUC / Cubi / Chromebox / etc. -style mini-PCs. (I believe those to be a small growth market.)

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Don't some of them still carry, like, floppy disks and typewriter ribbon? I suppose it'll be a while.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Don't some of them still carry, like, floppy disks and typewriter ribbon? I suppose it'll be a while.

LOL. My local Staples put their floppy disks on clearance years ago. I should know, I bought them. :| Still got that Sony 100-pack of 1.44MB wonders sitting in shrink-wrap on my shelf right now, as a matter of fact.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

LOL. My local Staples put their floppy disks on clearance years ago. I should know, I bought them. :| Still got that Sony 100-pack of 1.44MB wonders sitting in shrink-wrap on my shelf right now, as a matter of fact.

What color? I might be interested in 'em.

 

[TeknoBug]

A broad amount of customers buys prebuilt brand name desktops (the typical computer-illiterate folk), they're still going to be around for quite a lnog time until customers starts buying all-in-one or smaller formfactor computers in high numbers.

 

[Kaido]

Walmart is already selling the Intel Compute stick PC with the Atom X5 for $142:

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Intel-Com...DR3L-SDRAM-32-GB-Flash-Memory-Intel/134782943

The problem is that people have no perception of what a computer & vendors don't do a good job marketing them. For starters, imo most people should only own a Chromebook. No risk of viruses, require 2FA for security, throw in a wireless printer & Chromecast and be done with it. Second, most people don't realize they can just get a laptop, close the lid, and use that as an ultra-slim desktop. Third, the little stuff like BRIX or the even smaller HDMI stick PC's are just fine, but people think "computer = tower box" and "must not be any good if it's a laptop/mini-PC/etc.". I just replaced my dad's rig with a $490 laptop that has an i5 with a 2GB GTX940m, which spanks his old C2Q & 1GB Firepro unit (plus better display scaling for 4K output in Win10 over Win7).

Same thing with home theater stuff...even teenagers are surprised to learn they can plug an HDMI cable from their laptop to their TV. Or get a $99 Kangaroo PC from Infocus, a $25 Logitech K400 keyboard/trackpad combo, and hook that up to your HDTV or 4K TV to use as a big screen instead of sitting at a desktop. So many options that consumers are blind to because big-box stores don't advertise the stuff listed above very well, vendors certainly don't, and consumers aren't going to do the amount of research us nerds do to figure out what's available, so...yeah. Box PC's will be around for awhile

 

[Mike64]

I think it'll be a while. At least in my neck of the woods, you see a lot of people (and not just 20-somethings) "setting up shop" in various public places and working (at what, I don't know), for hours on end. (Not to mention posting on web forums about where the best places to do are, etc.) And while that could be done with tablets+keyboards, it's more a PITA and more cumbersome... Not to mention the small-as-a-percentage-of-the-overall-workforce but not so small-in-absolute-numbers of road-warrior types who can't really do what they do very well from keyboard-less devices, either. And laptops (or "2-in-1"s) will always be more convenient for those uses than <something else> plus keyboards... You can email your heart out or screw around on Facebook all day with a touch-screen keyboard, but writing any sort of actual "document" or manipulating spreadsheets and whatnot would totally suck without some sort of reasonably large physical keyboard... (And for that matter, afaipc, it sucks even without a mouse!)

Never mind! I apparently saw "laptop" instead of "desktop" in the OP - probably because we've had the "disappearing desktop" discussion so many times already my brain "assumed" we were moving on to laptops now (despite the fact that, as in the case of Flashplayer, the relevant PTB don't seem to have "gotten with the program", lo these many long years after the topic was beaten well beyond death the first time around, now have they?"/)...

 

[Commodus]

When will desktop sales disappear at these stores? Not for many years, I reckon -- there will likely be people who still want the cheapest possible PC, and creative pros / gamers who want more than a laptop can handle (the wisdom of buying those from Best Buy is another story).

However, I do suspect that a lot of the desktops on shelves will go away. It's just hard to convince people that a desktop is necessary when you can buy a good-enough laptop for little to no extra cost, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are sometimes just fine. The survivors at Best Buy and Staples will likely be Macs (since Apple's devices stand out), unusual designs with special roles (like HP's Sprout) or relatively high end systems that can't easily be replaced by laptops.

 

[HeXen]

My friend works at BB, I know they sell tons of the G20 gaming desktops. I even have one.

 

[Red Squirrel]

My fear is when companies like NCIX or Newegg cease to exist. I imaging there is quite a lot of overhead running that kind of business (need a HUGE warehouse, probably more than one) as the idea of building computers is very niche now. Tigerdirect is already on the verge of being gone. The customer base of these companies is getting smaller and smaller.

Myself, I can't imagine not having a proper computer or my own home servers, this whole cloud stuff and doing stuff with a tiny swipe screen is just not my idea of advancement. I see mobile devices as accessories and not replacements of computers.

 

[TeknoBug]

My friend works at BB, I know they sell tons of the G20 gaming desktops. I even have one.

You have a G20?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Tigerdirect is already on the verge of being gone.

TigerDirect, as a consumer-facing business entity, already IS GONE.

 

[Commodus]

My fear is when companies like NCIX or Newegg cease to exist. I imaging there is quite a lot of overhead running that kind of business (need a HUGE warehouse, probably more than one) as the idea of building computers is very niche now. Tigerdirect is already on the verge of being gone. The customer base of these companies is getting smaller and smaller.

Myself, I can't imagine not having a proper computer or my own home servers, this whole cloud stuff and doing stuff with a tiny swipe screen is just not my idea of advancement. I see mobile devices as accessories and not replacements of computers.

Those enthusiast shops will likely hang around so long as upgradable desktop PCs are at all viable, which I suspect is a long, long time (just not forever).

With that said: I'd say mobile devices are anything but accessories for some people. For many, even in well-off countries where PCs are affordable, their phone is the computing device they use the most frequently. In developing nations, it's frequently the only computing device they have. That's part of why the Windows PC market is shrinking. If you're a Chinese middle-class worker with $300 to spend on a device, do you drop it on a PC that'll stay at home most of the time, or a smartphone that will be useful virtually everywhere you go?

 

[TeknoBug]

TigerDirect, as a consumer-facing business entity, already IS GONE.

Tigredirect has always been mediocre in selection, at least in Canada, never been able to find anything really worth getting other than the Razer Taipan mouse at its cheapest I could find. Best Buy Canada is rapidly becoming that too, there's nothing but junk coming from Best Buy now.

 

[HeXen]

Want to see something funny guys?



"Promising Careers"

 

[Mike64]

My fear is when companies like NCIX or Newegg cease to exist.

And what of the likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and "even" Apple? I have no statistics to back me up, but I very strongly suspect home-builds are a small minority of existing desktop "installations"...

 

[Mike64]

With that said: I'd say mobile devices are anything but accessories for some people. For many, even in well-off countries where PCs are affordable, their phone is the computing device they use the most frequently.

True, but that ignores all the people who used/"needed" computers long before smartphones allowed people to use "computers" for things they simply wouldn't have done at all before smartphones existed. (ETA: And which for the most part, most users, even young ones who've grown up with them, probably wouldn't really miss all that much after the initial "shock" over the loss of them if they disappeared now. The loss of cellphones altogether would cause rioting in the streets, but smartphones, not so much.)

Much more so than was the case of cell phones as mere "portable telephones", smartphones really exist more because the industry became capable of building them (and of course they are really cool, now that they do exist) more than because they filled a pre-existing need (except perhaps for the pocket-sized, portable email reading capability.)

Sure, you can email, interact with "social media", perform specific web-based "transactions" that require limited input or displays (like consumer banking), (sorta) play (very limited) games, and (very sorta) surf the web generally on them, but good luck reading, much less writing, full length documents (especially those with information-heavy, rather than simply decorative or entertaining, photos/charts/graphs), spreadsheets, or even interacting with full web pages on them.

Very "eventually", technology will presumably advance to where those latter tasks can be performed on smartphone-sized devices docked, or wirelessly connected, to full-sized peripherals, but apart from sheer processing power requirements, I think the storage and video-display demands (ETA: not to mention power requirements) of that use-case push that scenario pretty far off the into the future... And by then, who knows? There are easily imaginable alternatives, like the plateauing of truly mobile device capabilities and for stationary needs, a move back to dumb or semi-smart "terminals" (possibly even using the "smart-but-not-brilliant" portable devices as the processing component of such terminals) connected - whether wirelessly or wired - to central home computers that would mostly exist to run our entire home's infrastructure/"ecosystem" but could easily provide a sort of "local cloud" for user services at the same time...