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Do Europeans Buy Computers In A Depression???
As my readers now, I have been declaring recessions and depressions in Europe for some time now, to wit:
- It's Official & As I Foretold Years Ago, Greece Is Now In A True Depression As Reality Hits Greek Banks
- Greece Sneezes, The Euro Dies of Pneumonia! Yeah, Sounds Bombastic, Yet True!
- As the Sell Side and MSM Sing The Praises of European Insurer "Street Cred" and
- When (Not If) Germany Slows, The Whole House Of Cards Collapses!!!
Now there is corroboratig anecdotal evidence coming out of the woodwork: Gartner reports Western Europe desktop shipments down in Q2 2012
Gartner reports Western Europe desktop shipments down, portable PCs up in Q2 2012
As reported by Endgadget:
When it comes to technology and the end of a financial quarter, you can bet your wage there'll be ananalyst report or two letting you what's what. And according to Gartner's latest estimates for Western Europe, PCs didn't fare too well in Q2 of this year, with a 2.4 percent decrease in shipments compared with the same period in 2011.
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People just found out that you don't need a state of the art desktop to do facebook, skype or ZH. Also, you find better and real friends down at the pub.
Wait......isn't this a main component of the CPI ? ......everyone knows you need a new computer or starve to death ...
Acer's growth is a big indication that the consumer is tapped. Acer is pretty much the bottom of the barrel.
And hardware really doesn't become obsolete very quickly. A dual core from 5 years ago still works very well with maybe a RAM upgrade. SSDs reduce HDD failure, as do LEDs for LCD backlights.
Yes, but using a five-year old computer is so not cool.
I read your comment. Shifted my eyes six inches south. There? "Acer." An x193w+. I bought a couple of 'em a few years ago for $99 each, free shipping from NewEgg. Yeah. 1680 x 1050, but, honestly? My preference was and remains a CRT at about 15 or 17 inches, and as for screen resolution even lower still.
Not a single dead or stuck pixel. Not a single hot pixel either. Sure, I know Acer didn't build the panel, but, well, oh, you mean iApple doesn't build their motherboards or GPUs? Western Digital doesn't build their hard drives? Dell doesn't build their optical drives or cases?
Not LED. Bleeds light around the edges. Cannot be (properly) calibrated. But, you know what? I can do perfect work with it notwithstanding its limitations. "A good workman never blames his tools."
Acer sucks? News to me.
Actually, now that I think about it, I think I bought about four or five at the time. Far as I know, all are the same.
Acer sucks? News to me.
The real question is whether Computers Buy Europeans in a seemingly neverending stream of "panic posts" emitted by Depressed Short Sellers.
"You can't eat computers."
The "Q" is whether to buy the "Survial Seeds" or pay for the "Secret to the Six Pack Abs".....tough choice.
Of course you can......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcIwXVKQjsQ
Waiting for DDR4 before upgrading. No sense buying an already dated computer.
With powerful laptops reasonably priced and pad things for those who don't run real programs the desktop is on the way out. This year I replaced 3 family desktops with 2 ASUS laptops and 1 Lenovo laptop. Shoulda got 3 ASUS. Purchased all at Amazon, best price even before no tax and free shipping.
we are a very technically oriented household.
We have 1 iPad, 2 Android phones, 2 Laptops but only one desktop.
The Desktop is a solid piece of work gear for document production because it has a 30" monitor and 2 23" monitors and if i had
the scratch i'd upgrade it to 2 30" monitors, Those big monitors just rock for the purposes of trying to figure out how to format and composit a large proposal, but, lets be serious here.
The Desktop is getting kind of crusty it was the first of the Core2duo Apple desktops and i'll only upgrade it when the hardware is ready to eat itself.
My Laptop is getting a little crusty but if i can limp another year out of it, I will.
my limit will be when the software I run no longer operates on it.
most laptop components are not nearly as interchangeable as desktop PC parts are. until then, my laptop is portable, but becomes dated every single year.
the desktop isn't going anywhere.
Daddy?
<deep voice> He is your brother, son. <mad laughter>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_princes_of_Hell
Reggie thinks Apple is "Other" and gives them 35% MS.
As for Asus - superb machines far better than Acer or HP or Dell. Anyway aren't Dell and HP both made by Compal of Taiwan ?
Lenovo is declining in quality
70% of human interaction with the world is done visually, which is why the desktops powering your 24' screen are not challengeable. I'd never use a small screen mobile device or laptop unless I'm forced to (such as when being waiting in an Airport). The user experience is simply not there.
When I get to the office with my laptop I connect the wireless adapter for the keyboard/mouse and then hook up my 24" monitor. I've become attatched to a 24"+ screen and will have a 32" at the house when I quit spending money on other things. I'll always have a desk top if I can build one.
Wonder when they catch up with the Retina-display in PC-Space
PC laptops incorporated 'retina' displays for 5+ years before Apple finally pushed their 15" product beyond the 1680x1050 threshold. And certainly the next iteration of PC laptops will probably, for customers who want to pay the $$$, incorporate the same panel Apple is selling for now.
Desktops are important in industrial/engineering applications where you would be running CAD, Finite Element Analysis, compiling code, and other CPU intensive processes. In Europes case EADS, Rolls, VW etc. would be key purchasers of desktops. For workers not doing these tasks they are given a laptop and a laptop dock. There are a lot more people writing emails than people running multivariate optimizations, so laptop docks should corellate better with corporate hiring than desktop sales.
All that stuff can be done on contemporary laptops; if it exceeds the power of a laptop, it probably is an app that needs to be built for some sort of distributed/scaled computing back-end.
EADS, Rolls, VW,' etc. engineers, are mere specs of dust in the universe of demand for machines.
Desktops have become obsolete. Most everything can or soon will be done on Tablets and Smart phones. It need only be a terminal device that has access to software residing on remote computers with exponentially higher computing capabilities. We can see this trend in the above Desktop sales numbers.
Lots of people BUILD computers so you need to look at component shipments
I have never bought a pre-built PC. My father considered it important to know your tools, so I built my PCs and fixed my own car, and still do except were time won't allow.
I think most non business users have both a desktop and a laptop in the house, unless they are single.
#41
I'd probably be less cynical of Reggie's posts if they didn't all contain some iteration of "I told you so".
It gets old...and tiresome.
Reggie has earned the right to say, "I told you so". And he did it the good ole fashioned way.
"I told you so" is a mere declaration of classlessness. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you want to applaud it, then by all means, go right ahead. I choose not to.
They buy 699 IPad instead to watch olympics.
Reggie, Reggie, Reggie
Not many desktop computer sales in Europe is not bad for Europe.
Not many desktop computer sales in Europe is bad for????... the USA.
Have you seen Exchange Rates lately? Not much is coming out of the US… nor the UK…. To this side of the ocean.
Please keep your enthusiastic speech of telling everybody that the Euro is going to break…till Europe floods you with European Made products.
By the way. Have you looked at the last things you brought home because they were cheaper? Where were they made?
I'm sure the overall -2.4% trend is cause for concern, or at least continued observation. Part of what I see is that Europeans have figured out that if you buy a Dell you get gouged to buy a computer that's loaded with proprietary crap that makes it harder for you to run your own computer (just like Apple, but with Windows), and HP products are such inutterable pieces of shit no price is low enough.
I once installed an HP all-in-one to an HP desktop, and HP's all-in-one software corrupted Windows on the desktop and I had to reformat and reinstall. The HP all-in-one had a 3-year warranty, and it died during month 37.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the overall desktop market is shrinking, due to the improved capability for the price of laptops, tablets, etc.
Great story about the HP. Will have to remember that one for next time I wanna impress some ladiez.
why buy a desktop when you can get a laptop with a terabyte hard drive and the new genital mitt
Theoretically, desktop has more room, better cooling> longer life. Don't know if this still holds. I run a couple of pentium5 desktops (ibm thinkcentre 8187) and am finding they are slower or maybe I'm less patient. Have bumped up power supply, ram, hard drive, cooling fan, graphics card over the years> not much more to upgrade. Thinking of buying intel i3 based desktop, anybody got any ideas of what's good for price/function? Mostly streaming quotes- forexpros, TOS, ZH and a few other sites up all the time- currently 3 screens. Thanks.
Don't use Windows....you hardware will then be good until it fails...
rt
I3 is good bang for the buck, get lotsa ram and a solid state hard drive. Get a discrete video card, top dollar not necessary for what you're doing.
i3 2120 at $109 from NewEgg right now is the best deal in computer hardware !!EVER!! since the beginning of time. The way-sub $100 Pentium g6xx something or others are just behind (www.tomshardware.com). One may make an argument that the almost twice as expensive i5xx something or others are an even better cost/benefit, but I really don't think so. Let's get real ... there's more processing power in a single i3 and, oh, what? a still available gtx460 than existed planet wide just ten or 20 years ago. For just $400 to $600 (depending on whether Left4Dead or ARMA is your thing), one can assemble a computer that you could not have exported to North Korea five or eight years ago. In fact (depending on what you have in the bone yard), you could assemble such a computer for about $210. Spend $1,000-1,500, knowing what you're doing, and you could build something that they would confiscate inbound to Iran today.
If I was going to build myself a computer today (and I've been doing this now for nearly twenty years and just love computer hardware), I would start with a $110 i3 2120. I would do this even if I won the lottery. Well, maybe. I dunno. The question is: Is the performance advantage worth a couple ASEs? I dunno. I don't think I could recommend the i5 to anyone (myself included) except to those for whom money is no object, which I don't think includes a single denizen (rich or poor) of zerohedge.
Top dog in cryptographic hardware? Sony Playstations. Or Xboxes. Or something like that. Been a year or two since I noticed the article. Seriously. There's a big room somewhere filled with Sony Playstations with U.S. Marines stationed outside with full auto weapons.
But Reggie.. where's Apple? Oh know, that would not fit your other absurd thesis... Google over Apple.
With Apple kicking out Google from the Mac world, I thing Google is going to be taking some margin hits!
Time to short Google and long Apple.
Cheers
This may be the most retarded analysis I've ever seen on anything.
Do you work for CNBC or the Fed?
(That of course is a trick question since they're both the same!)
ASUS is kicking ass! Have you seen the new TF700 Tablet?
I've been borderline on commiting to pick one up. I refuse to buy an iPad, not because I don't like the trendiness, but rather that I do not like how locked in everything Apple makes is. If I buy a device, I want to do what I want, and not be restricted by what the manufacturer, whom I paid to own the device, says I should be able to do with it. The TF700 is something that is close enough for me to make the switch from Laptop to tablet permanently.
Their routers are off the charts good.
no statistics on apple products? Wow!
Apple is HOT in Eurozone.
as usual, as everywhere ...a class act/apart ;)
Apparently they don't buy American made computers..
Are there computers made in Amerika?
The actual CPU cores are fabbed in the US. Assembly is left to the Third World. An example Intel chipsets are made about 8 miles away from where I sit right now in Arizona. Graphics cores are usually made in NY, Texas, or CA. Doesn't matter the brand as they all use Global Foundries for their graphics fabs.
Actually TSMC builds most of the discrete graphics chips out there.
Most of the components are cheaper in USD
To be honest, I am surprised there hasnt been a bigger drop in desktop sales. This chart merely shows that portables are the new trend. Europe may very well be in a depression, but pointing out the obvious wrt computer purchasing trends does not make a very compelling argument.
everybody is buying tablets these days. I was even amazed a while ago when all the seniors in my family started buying iPads. and what else to that need? they need a computer for the internet and to look to pictures.