I still use my 5 year old desktop (upgraded twice) for development. I like to open box and upgrade it myself , if I want to do similar on laptop I think twice . Freedom to upgrade it yourself is a bliss.
The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
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Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#12Right, that's what it means to say that the market is dying. But if you need to feel clever, feel clever.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#13I built a dev/gaming machine back in early 2010. It's stout, but not a ridiculously expensive (~$1,000) behemoth. The only thing I've done since then is toss some more RAM in so I could have two sets of triple channel DDR3 instead of one. I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings. The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound f…
~$1,000 sounds quite cheap for a gaming machine which can still run any modern game at highest settings. I remember I built mine at about the same time (2010) for $2500, top notch video card, fastest cpu, lots of ram, but its 2013 now and I can not say that it runs any modern game at highest settings.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#14Good point, well made.
Personally, I upgrade incrementally, and I still use my PC on a regular basis. The machine I have now is a hodge-podge of parts from different ERAs. I have an Intel Q6600 but DDR3 RAM, and a modern, quite beefy graphics card that I bought when it was in the upper-echelons in early 2013. It runs most modern games pretty well. I have an SSD for most software but also three big HDDs, one of which I've had since my first build in 2004.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#15CPUs have not gotten significantly faster in the last couple years, especially at the high end.
Back in Q1 2010 I got an Intel Core i7 980X which benchmarked at 8911 according to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+X+980+...
Now in Q2 2013 (3 years later) the very top of the line processor available, an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2, is only twice as fast at 16164: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2690+v...
It used to be that things got faster at a much faster rate. And until this new E5-2690 v2 was released, the fastest CPU was only 14000 or so, which is less than 2x as fast.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#16Thinkpad T60 purchased (refurb!) in 2007. Still a rock solid machine. It does get a little warm though..
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#17Basically this, computers hit good enough a while ago, now you just have to replace parts when they die. Yes, on paper, the latest processor is faster than the one released two years ago but you have to be doing specific types of workloads with it to really make a big difference.
Yeah. The last major thing for PCs in the past couple years were probably SSDs.
The upgrade to SSD was glorious. Like 386 to pentium. Watching my machine boot that fast made me grin for months.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#18Mainly we don't need new ones because the 3 year old one is still doing the job. That wasn't the case a decade ago - your 3 year old PC was seriously out of date and couldn't run most games released that year and probably not install the latest OS release. This rapid progress has flattened out considerably. Now people upgrade to get nice features such as retina displays or SSD drives, but that's optional (so you don'…
Agree , even for development you can compile almost all programs light or heavy on a powerful machine built 3 years ago.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#19the article is falling under fallacy of assuming the wrong sample. Of course the author wouldn't buy new PC because he can upgrade his old one. Heck, almost any tech-savvy people can in fact upgrade or build one from the scratch. If not, chances are that you know at least one person who can help you and after the first time, it just gets easier.
the PC market isn't dead, it is slowly receding and it won't stop. It's because of the new alternatives, and assuming finite budge, when you get one of the alternatives, which cost roughly around a consumer-level laptop, you don't have enough for another PC that you don't need.
The article to me seems extremely narrow in both its oversight and scope. People don't care about processing power not because it's a marketing gimmick, but because they don't care. People who do care are the ones who know enough to care, and they will always be minority.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#20I'm typing this on a PC where I did the same thing as the author. Over the past 10 years, I've swapped out a part every two years or so to keep it running the latest and greatest. But the CPU is five years old and still running fine. I'm planning to donate it to a non-profit to replace a computer that's almost 10 years old and also still running fine.
There was a time when you felt like a new PC was obsolete the second you took it out of the box. But that was because we were just scratching the surface of what we could do with new hardware. We're now at a point where it's hard to find consumer and business applications for all the spare hardware that you can afford.
Mobile adoption has been so quick because everyone is buying devices for the first time (tablets), or there is an incentivized two-year replacement cycle (phones). But I'm still using an original iPad that works just fine, and a 3 year old cell phone with no reason to upgrade. Eventually, I think we'll start to see the same leveling off in mobile as well.