Many years ago people thought console would take over gaming. And it turns out Keyboard and Mouse are irreplaceable for certain type of games. You may never play PSE or FIFA on your PC any more, but many more strategy games, Online Games, FPS are still on PC. And as generation of people who grew up in gaming, there is ever increasing number of people on Twitch or other E-Sport streaming site.

Unfortunately Apple thinks Gaming is a waste of time. And therefore Mac doesn't really cater for Games Developers. iOS Gaming is still a result of iOS popularity rather then Apple making it better. We can used to argue PC gaming is niche, for nerds, Riva TNT, 3Dfx, Rage 128, Radeon, Geforce.....

Now PC Gaming is no longer a small communities, and will continue to grow into much larger in the years to come.

“It wasnt a bug! It was economic stimulus!” /s

Consider the following: 1) Per user revenue in iOS out paces per user revenue in Android by so much that many titles make more on iOS than they do on Android despite Android having ~70% of the market

2) Apples hardware & os provide superior performance relative to even premium Android phones despite Apples compulsion towards thinner. (This is largely due to vulkans infancy compared to the relative maturity of metal)

3) fragmentation

4) walled garden is actually a plus for developers who worry about apk sharing

5) Apples store does business in China making Apple a one stop shop for the world whereas android requires at least one separate partner just for China.

Note: Please pardon any grammar, spelling, & formatting errors due to this response originating from a mobile device

Once there’s enough money to be made, publishers will tackle any issue there is to move a genre to the bigger audience.

That doesn’t mean for me that PC gaming will fade away, just that it will stay a limited market where makers will experiment more freely than on the other marketplaces.

It's 1.4% growth of something that was going downhill for a while already, so it might not be too impactful

The consumer market can still drop further though. Most people are fine using ipads, and probably even better off than with a laptop when all things are considered.

PC sales were at their peak when machines were outdated in 6 months and obsolete in 2 years. That era is completely dead. At this point there are likely literally billions of reasonably high performance machines out in the world. And I think also more people than ever have realized that 'building your own computer' is about as difficult as putting together a 10 piece lego toy, and you get exactly what you want, and you likely save a reasonable amount of money.

As a result, the last time I decided I still needed a Windows box but both my old DIY systems were down for various counts, I just bought a 17" Alienware laptop which worked, reduced the clutter, and is just fine. (And I'm not sure it cost more than I'd have ended up spending.)

Now Windows 10 is driving an upgrade cycle by arbitrarily dropping support for old stuff and shipping every 6 months. Microsoft will continue to squeeze until people leave the platform.

A modern cpu from the same price class as five years ago is twice as fast. NVMe storage is also many times faster than SATA, and five years ago hdd’s were commonplace anyway. I’m not even going to discuss graphics.

Windows 10’s hardware requirements are quite low: 1 ghz cpu, 2 gb ram, 20 gb hard drive. That’s 10 year old hardware. How much older do you expect them to support? Should it run on 20 year old hardware? To be fair 5 year old laptops might have driver compat issues on w10, but more likely the reason for the business uptick is just that pc’s only last so long before they need to be replaced, and for convenience of support they tend to replace in bulk.

Even 4 year old pc owners might find their systems to be partially supported: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-blocks-windows-10-cr...

Tablet sales have yanked though, and touch keyboards suck for writing anything longer than, say, this comment. (Actually, even this given the incidence of typos... Count them!)

If your job involves wound emails, you probably need a laptop.

The intersting dynamic is that people tend to spend more time mastering their phones (for instance installing printing apps, dropbox etc.) and don’t want to maintain another completely different device they’ll only use occasionaly.

This means people with old PCs won’t care much if it’s slow and clunky, as they won’t use it much. People without a PC yet might bail out completely and use their work computer when they have stuff that can only be done on PC.

(note: total PC shipments are 61 million, business users included, while iPad sales for 2017 quarters were a about 11 million. People turning to the iPad for “big screen” tasks is a big enough trend I think)

I assembled both, and they work quite well at their tasks. I would never want to work with a pre-built computer again.

Includes both laptops and desktops

Also, some miners were buying prebuilt systems to harvest the GPU, then out a cheaper GPU in it and sell it.

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bi...

Among my friends in their 20s, most of them want to build a PC. It could be the case that my generation didn't experience the growth and the decline of the PC market and we don't appreciate the value of laptops yet. The hype for building a custom PC certainly exists.

But from a consumer's standpoint, I also think laptops win in most cases.

Correction: Thanks to the reply, I noticed that "PC Market" statistics included both Laptops and Desktop PCs. I am leaving this post as is, as it represents my ideas on why there is still a -possibly growing?- interest for desktop PCs.

The growth in the PC market had nothing to do with the consumer market.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/pc-market-appears-to...

Gartner reports that the growth was driven by increased business sales and that consumer shipments declined. IDC similarly pointed to the "business-driven refresh cycle" as a reason for the increase. This mirrors Microsoft's financial reporting; the software giant distinguishes between business and consumer sales of Windows and Office, and the general pattern over the last few quarters is that business sales have been robust even as consumer demand continues to soften. Enterprises are migrating to Windows 10, and they're buying new hardware to do so.

My T470P with an i7-7700HQ/32GB RAM/nvme m.2 handles all the programming I realistically need to do (I realised this when I had W10 running in a VM (8Gb/2 CPU), 3 vagrant instances and intellij open and still had 12GB of RAM free.

When I bought the laptop the plan was to build a Ryzen desktop pretty much immediately afterwards but here I am a year later deferring that till next year and the Zen2 architecture and my incentive to build a desktop has gone out the window, the Thinkpad runs a 27" 4K display just fine and for programming thats all I need it to do when I don't feel like working on the sofa.

So yes I can see ML and Gaming been a driver but since I don't do the former and rarely have the time for the latter I'm in the strange position of having a laptop be my primary computer for the first time since I started using PC's in 1987.

Hell the only game I play anymore on PC is Chess everything else the Xbox One is just fine.

So I broke down and got a new laptop with an i7 8650U, and it is disturbing how much faster it is, considering the base frequency seems to be significantly lower (1.9). I am wondering whether there is some now-ubiquitous function, perhaps relating to encryption that is accelerated on newer processors. Single threaded benchmarks only indicate it should be 2x as fast, but there is far more of a difference than that. Without identifying what the improvement is, I have the nagging doubt I should've identified a software problem on my old computer. I did try Linux on it, and that was not stunningly fast either.

So I would be happy with my new PC, except that I'm wary I'm being flim-flammed with software that makes old hardware run like crap, and the performance is an illusion. But hey, maybe the hardware has improved in 7 years. I remember when that was an eternity.

Gartner describes the data[1] as "Data includes desk-based PCs, notebook PCs and ultramobile premiums (such as Microsoft Surface), but not Chromebooks or iPads."

[1]: https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3881812

But is a 8th gen i3 significantly lower price than the 7th gen i5 when it came out? Because using your logic, that would be what would matter here.

If it's not, then it may be due to the availability of Ryzen CPUs, too, which are cheaper for more cores.

Other players I play with online are always talking about upgrades and saving up for a complete new system with all the latest hardware.

So I think fortnite and PUBG have definitely driven some growth in Gaming PC sales/hardware sales. Also the popularity of youtubers and streamers are driving kids and teens to ask for gaming PCs too.

Now that PUBG is on Xbox there is a new influx of players who started playing it on console but wanted to move over to the PC version.

Shooters on PC are much better than playing on a console, plus you usually get the features, updates and new maps first. But the feel of playing with a mouse and keyboard is way better on PC. Console ones are fun but I much prefer playing on a PC.

Business orders are likely driving the growth.

I haven’t even owned a Windows-based PC in 10 years and I’m on the market for a liquid cooled GTX 1080Ti and AMD Threadripper — guess what is old is new again. Fun times!

VR is what got me to build my own PC after a decade of exclusive mac use.

HP + Dell added 1.7 million units vs the prior year. A substantial boost for them.

From April:

"Tax Windfall Going to Capex Way Faster Than Stock Buybacks"

"Among the 130 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results in this earnings season, capital spending increased by 39 percent, the fastest rate in seven years, data compiled by UBS AG show."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/trump-tax...

I'm unsure whether those units are counted as part of the PC market

That allows me to use Linux (by corporate policy again) for day to day development.

Does web based enterprise apps count as thin client?

With $300 you can get a retina display laptop with Celeron quad-core and 6 GB RAM.

Large enterprise environment so users are all on Windows

Obviously, this spec is not the same for say, a video production system or the like. I would point out that most workloads have a negligible to non-existent network latency on a good internal network.

(Also, note that on a 1 TB 5.6k drive, your drive latency is worse than my network latency.)

There is an extraordinary amount of full employment at the moment in 'b*s4it jobs', those pointless jobs that don't really matter but somehow exist. Small to medium sized businesses just bloat out with these positions over time and only a harsh recession means that these jobs get systematically culled. With these jobs you need yet another PC. You can't buy fancy laptops as there is status value in those things and a PC is as glorified as a phone on the desk of someone doing one of these make-believe-jobs of inane pointlessness. Demand for stationary cupboard supplies is probably also up 1.4% with BIC taking a few sales from PaperMate in an otherwise flat market.

This is the sort of headline you get when the housing market needs a 'boost'. Anecdotally you may know that nobody has been able to buy/sell for ages and that prices are not going up, however, some survey that is independent but paid for buy a building society/bank comes out to give the impression that the market is moving again.

The Update in the story cites another report where the numbers for HP and Lenovo are different, so the headline 1.4% is margin of error, not a genuine sign of a market on the move.

"PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment. In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC. In the business segment, PC momentum will weaken in two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes. PC vendors should look for ways to maintain growth in the business market as the Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off."

> Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer.

Apple is part of the market increase.

MacRumors highlighted Apple's numbers from the same report. They grew 3% YoY: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/12/mac-shipments-up-in-q2-...

The Apple numbers are always a useful reminder of what a bubble I'm in. While 7% isn't trivial, any event I attend has a lot of Macs (and more of the other laptops are probably running Linux than Windows).