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ianlevesque

Maybe corporate PCs finally needed a refresh.

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Immediate business expensing courtesy of the US tax changes.

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...

Maybe. Our company is doing a large refresh, but we no longer get physical PCs, it's all thin clients to a virtualized environment

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

What sort of workloads does your company run? Are they MS Windows or *nix thin clients?

Company is so huge it pretty much has to run every workload under the sun

Large enterprise environment so users are all on Windows

And we all remember those from the 1980s. Those things were so bad that we switched to windows in the first place.

It's amazing, every 5 years another boneheaded IT manager revives the whole thinclient thing.

The company I currently contract with does almost everything in Google apps or other web based services.

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

Does web based enterprise apps count as thin client?

What exactly do you mean by a thin client?

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

...where?

This is most likely it. Businesses are switching from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and are buying new hardware for it.

That’s what I’ve seen. Between adding an SSD and upgrading to Win 10 it just make sense to get a new machine with a new warranty

Still shocked how many PCs are sold today with traditional 1 TB 5.6k drives. SSD is still often treated like a special request part, which is insane, given a business PC only needs a 128 GB hard drive. (As all data belongs on the network.)

Data primary authorative source belongs in the network. I'd still like to work with my data without network latency, thank you very much.

On a given standard desktop PC load, you need about half of a 128 GB hard drive. Feel free to use the other half for staging files you're working on. :)

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.)

I tend to agree with you, but it depends a bit on the kind of data. Office documents are fine in a network share, but I prefer my Git repo locally. For audio/video it really depends on the network setup.

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