"Nobody even really sells desktop PCs anymore except custom gaming rigs and low-power kiosk boxes." I believe you should embrace the novelty concept called 'work' sometime. Then you may see some 'niche' application of PCs. Mobile devices can, yes, be sold in bigger numbers, may produce higher profit, many trivial applications like browsing for news and sharing our newest and greatest experiences by tweets and photos do not require, luckily, a desktop anymore and so these paramount usages could been shifted to the only important platform of mobile devices, yet the second grade activities of design, manufacturing, academia and so still rely on the archaic concept of desktop computers and they keep alive this dying artefact. Even traitor mobile developers (all of them, the fools!) dare to use desktop computers still instead of solely relying on mobile phones. But not long, soon the last aircraft engineer or corporate accountant will sell their desks and throw away the last of the keyboards moving to the only necessary platform of mobiles so the PC can go extinct finally!

I think the GP’s point was laptop sales are outgroing desktop sales at a high pace for a while now. And that in an overall stagnating market.

More that both laptops and desktops are dinosaurs compared to mobile so Apple isn’t pouring R&D into them. And it’s a smart move.

> Nobody even really sells desktop PCs anymore except custom gaming rigs and low-power kiosk boxes.

My personal impression is that while pre-built PCs are mostly sold to businesses, there is a strong growing trend since a few years to build your own PC from parts. I really do observe that if mobility is not an issue, people now tend to move away from laptops towards self-built PCs (or often rather: let a good friend build one). I don't want to go into the details what advantages these have over laptops, but just mention customizability with respect to requirements (e.g. very silent, very high-power, ...) and repairability.

A small (but only small) contributing factor is that laptops do not have sufficient power for VR, so you really need a stationary PC for VR.

The strongest "dampening factors" with respect to this trend are the growing prices of GPUs, because lots of cryptocurrency miners (in the last years in particular Ethereum) hoard them (but it is my impression that this will somewhat ebb away as soon as attractive ASICs for Ethereum get released) and the growing prices of RAM lately. On the other hand the release of Ryzen made building of PCs with either very high-performance or very good cost-benefit ratio feasible.

Is building your own PC really a recent trend?

A lot of early pcs were kits people built, and I remember pc gaming in the '90s and '00s was also heavily focused on custom built machines.

Probably the last couple decades saw custom PC building decline in market share as prebuilt solutions became mainstream, but perhaps it's seeing a resurgence now that most consumers have moved from focusing on computers to focusing on smartphones as their personal tech hub.

Now that prebuilt PCs tend to be cheap and limited, anyone who wants something better needs to build the machine from parts.

Prebuilt pcs were cheap in the '90s and '00s as well. Premium brands like AlienWare still exists for gamers.

But in the 90s laptops were insanely expensive. :-)

Not a recent trend but online communities act as a catalyst.

Custom built PCs are a niche. The vast majority of people just want to buy a box that works.

> Custom built PCs are a niche. The vast majority of people just want to buy a box that works.

That is why I wrote

"(or often rather: let a good friend build one)." :-)

Seriously: In my opinion (but others might disagree) an advantage of self-built PCs over one that some company produces is that you know exactly what components are inside (in particular you can buy components in which you trust), which makes you far less dependent on driver support by the manufacturer (i.e. you can find drivers in the internet by yourself if necessary). I often had bad experience with driver support by manufacturers (expect for a few well-respected names).

Also lots of cheap PC manufacturers install lots of crapware by default, while your self-built one is a very clean install.

In summary a self-built PC often "just works" far better than a pre-built one.

You're forgetting the most important reason to DIY: money. Where manufacturers are happy to charge you 2x the price to double your RAM or put in a non-shitty SSD, DIYing can shave off a few hundred Euro.

Just as an example, over at apple.com, the new iMac comes with 32GB of DDR4 2666MHz ECC RAM. To add 32GB (64GB total) they are charging 960€, or 2,880€ to add 96GB (128GB total).

Looking on amazon or geizhals.eu (price comparison site), 16GB ECC DDR4 2666MHz sticks cost 200-220€ x 2 = ~450€ für 32GB. That means you can save 500€ on just RAM alone.

Same applies to SSD storage. And graphics cards. And CPU. And basically anything you could want to upgrade.

> Just as an example, over at apple.com, the new iMac comes with 32GB of DDR4 2666MHz ECC RAM. To add 32GB (64GB total) they are charging 960€, or 2,880€ to add 96GB (128GB total).

Specifically Apple is well-known for their expensive pricing for better optional components (which is often necessary to pay, since for many models you cannot simply replace the component (RAM, SSD etc.) by another one on your own).

Good point. I should have used e.g. Dell or HP as an example, they do the same albeit AFAIK slightly less absurd price-hiking.

PC gaming is growing and thats where mostly the trend for self-built PCs comes from and most of the growth in PC market. It is still dwarfed by Laptop sales though. As an anecdote, today i know hardly anyone who owns a desktop PC while 10-15 years ago almost everyone had one.

The trend around me is to see the shops that used to sell PC parts closing down, while consumer stores have 80% of their PC surface full with laptops, tablets and mobile devices.

> The trend around me is to see the shops that used to sell PC parts closing down

Couldn't this be simply explained by the hypothesis that people simply buy their PC parts mostly in the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop?

It could, but I am willing to bet that is even more niche than going to a physical shop.

The kind of experts capable of understanding if they are ordering hardware that is supposed to work together instead of blowing up in some form when assembled, is quite tiny.

I'm sure it's rarer than I'd like to think, but if I managed to figure it out as a teen in the mid 90's without much in the way of internet access or budget, it's still probably easier today.

Anyone with a modern internet connection and a bit more patience than money (or at least a willingness to learn) can hop on Reddit or PC Part Picker and get a pretty good idea of what is out there and works together.

Compared to the days of making sure you had the right number and type of ISA, PCI, and AGP slots, assembling a PC from parts today is a breeze. Shopping online keeps costs low and places like Microcenter are great for buying in person.

I only haven't built one in a while because my current 5-year-old workhorse media/editing/gaming/everything PC shows no sign of needing a full upgrade any time soon. Sure I bought a new GPU after a few years when I got bitten by the experimental VR bug but other than that, it was an afternoon buying parts and snapping them together, an evening installing software, and 5+ years of "just working".

The “enthusiast” segment of the market is small. Even then you don’t have nearly the choice in vendors you used to, so people mix and match parts from the same 5 or 6 vendors who’ve been there forever.

Cryptocurrency mining has kept the enthusiast hardware market afloat, I have a feeling...

GPU prices seem to be normalizing the past week, at least here in Europe using historical price data from Geizhals[0]. If things continue we will be back to "normal" 2017 prices very shortly.

[0]: www.geizhals.eu

Examples:

1070: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1456548

1070 TI: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1717563

1080: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1449277

1080 TI: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1587606

I disagree, I think Apple is still rather committed to the Mac even if it is no longer their #1 priority. Even if it's a small part of their profits, it's a big source of the strength of their brand (visually speaking, a Mac stands out against a PC far more than an iPhone stands out against any other smartphone), and that's something that's crucial for all of their products. Bad press about the Mac damages the brand, and if they don't continue to put out a good product (and correct their recent mistakes) they are going to keep getting bad press. I would argue that the Watch and Air Pods are more in the category of the Apple TV than they are the iPhone, because they're just a means of pushing up the average value of each iPhone customer. The Mac both does this and serves as a "halo" which is crucial even if it's less profitable. Honda certainly isn't making much money on NSX sales but that doesn't mean it's not still vital for them to produce it just for the sake of the brand (although I admit that's a bit of an extreme example).

The big signal for me that Macs are becoming second class citizens is if they ever start supporting Xcode on something that isn’t MacOS. That is the only thing keeping app developers on their platform, and if/when that changes, you know the final nail is in.

I would be surprised if Apple doesn’t throw in with Microsoft soon around mobile development. There’s a lot of symbiosis there — Apple and Microsoft don’t really compete in very many markets against eachother anymore.

Visual Studio is actually an awesome development platform (I’m including VSTS in this). There’s not much secret sauce in Xcode to threaten Apple’s App Store revenue — it’s just a bunch of signing keys that Apple controls and manages.

I do think Apple will make a strategic decision to diversify from core Mac OS soon. The ever-shrinking space allocated to traditional computers at the Apple Store has convinced me of that. They have more floor space allocated to the Apple Watch than they do the Mac these days.

Sure; but users stopped buying computer hardware on specs last decade (or at least the mass market Apple is chasing). Macs aren’t even any more expensive than top-end PC laptops. They’re just a brand choice.

They definitely aren’t usually buying them because of typical CPU/RAM specs or whatever, but I think things like battery life, trackpad, keyboard, display, general build quality are all still very relevant aspects of hardware that people pay attention to. The slow upgrade cycle is definitely hurting things and generally slowing everything down, but it’s not as terrible as it’s often made out to be. It’s been a few years since the 5K iMac launched and it’s still a great desktop. The Mac Pro was botched but at least they’re fixing it. We’ve only had 2 years of weak MacBook Pro releases, and it’s very possible that the next release later this year will address both major issues: a bad keyboard and no 32GB RAM option. The keyboard will matter more for most people, but the added RAM plus 2 more CPU cores and Vega graphics will be a big win for true pro users. I don’t think they’ve necessarily “coasted” on Macs just because the last couple years have been weak. It’s more accurate IMO to say they’ve just fucked up a couple times in the last 5 years — specifically with the Mac Pro and the butterfly keyboard devices.

Oh I agree; Apple’s brand carries a ton of heft in the laptop market because they generally get the “product” features (keyboards, battery life, screen quality, etc) right. It’s only so noticeable because their track record has been so good — we would still have plastic laptops and trackpads with mushy membrane keyboards without Apple’s industrial design incorporating metal and glass.

And honestly, their desktop line looks very similar to many PC companies. They make the Mac Mini (aka the Apple NUC), the all-in-one iMac, and the Mac Pro (ok, the Mac Pro sucks and there’s no excuse for it).

Anyone doing serious workstation tasks these days is likely using a cloud-based solution. There are a few specialized exceptions (ML development stands out to me), but none big enough to build a product around. Especially when doubling the entire PCs and Laptops category wouldn’t move the needle for Apple at all.

Approximate yearly sales of desktop PCs worldwide (all kinds) are 200 million per year... I can't find 5 year refresh cycles on any HP, Dell, etc. desktops or laptops.

They tend to refresh in line with corporate cycles, i.e. 18 month to 3 years, from what I see.

Contrast with ~1.5 billion (!) smartphone sales per year.

Sounds like a 'we sell more shoes than airplanes so we don't need airplanes no more' kind of argument.

such figures wont last forever once smartphones are sufficiently mature and there is no performance difference from one model to the next.

The main reason to buy a new phone these days surely is "the old one broke". Being with us all the time. The planned obsolence - unreplaceable battery, glued screen, glassback etc mean phones break all the time.

PCs stand still, even laptops tend be mostly stationary. No wonder my work laptop is now 6 years old and I feel no urge to request upgrade.

> The planned obsolence - unreplaceable battery, glued screen, glassback etc mean phones break all the time.

Don't forget planned insecurity two years after release through unpatched software vulnerabilities.

With shops still selling un-upgradable Android devices with 5.1 on them, I seriously doubt non-technical users actually care about it.

https://tinyurl.com/yakmsz6b (sorry, in German)

People drop their smartphones more often than their desktops.

But I expect cheaper devices to take more share, since the "high-end" won't give you much benefits over them. My 120 EUR Xiaomi already offers amazing cost performance compared to most other Androids.

Which is pretty much where we are now. At this point smartphone sales are mostly based on making performance more affordable, and lots of marketing.