PC shipments fall at fastest rate ever

It's honestly getting hard for me to justify having a more powerful PC. I have a Threadripper build (3960x) with a 2080 Super, along with 2x 3.5" drives, 2x SATA SSDs, and 3x NVMe drives. The thing draws like 200-250W at idle. Closer to 400-500W under moderate gaming. I'm looking at upgrading to a 4090 since gaming at 4K is pretty "meh" on a 2080. The embargo lifted today and I've been skimming the review: it looks like these cards will draw 500W continuous _by themselves._ So I'd be looking at potentially 700W+ from the wall.

My A/C failed this year and I became acutely aware of just how much heat my current workstation is pumping into my room. Even with the A/C running my room is about 5-10degF hotter than the rest of the house. So for me I'm starting to run into thermal constraints; there's also the noise factor. All my PCIe bandwidth comes at a hefty price: which is that the sTRX4 chipset is actively cooled with a pathetically tiny fan.

Perhaps it's just part of being older and wiser, but I'm starting to be more enthused about the process/efficiency refinements rather than the generational performance leaps. I'm actually thinking about "downsizing" significantly with my 2024-rig. (The threadripper is still a beast though, it will probably get racked in a 4U case as my next home server.)

Who knows though, maybe I'll figure out how to reject the heat outside my domicile and go balls to the wall with a 64c/128t monster. I guess it all depends on if AMD decides to release another HEDT chipset by 2024.

My PC is from 2015, I really need to update it and I will soon.

But looking at what component prices have been like recently (which has also been reflected even in pre-built machines) it doesn't surprise me that sales have fallen.

Most of my private computing devices are 10 years older and they still deliver on what is needed, including running Visual Studio 2022, or having Windows 10, Ubuntu LTS and such.

We have plateau in the need of computing power, in fact most home users would probably be just fine with an Atari ST or Amiga like computer updated to handle modern Internet and that is about it.

My current smartphone beats the workstation I was using at CERN almost 20 years ago.

Worth calling out that PC shipments over the last 2 years were much higher than before the pandemic.

As expected, PC shipments have been on a downward trend since 2009 or so, with a significant bump in 2020-2021:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264467/global-pc-shipmen...

It seems like return to normal from pandemic induced purchases. The global PC market's long-term growth should match the rate of computer penetration into emerging economies. And many users won't even feel the need for a PC, given that their smart phone does what they need.

What will the big players do about this?

The Dells HPs, ...

I guess they will have to try to sabotage open source projects that deliver those applications that people on Linux use as everyday drivers. Browser, E-mail client, Libre Office.

Sabotage them in a way that they use more resources, especially CPU time and RAM, driving people to upgrade.

Or they will try to influence media outlets to mostly offer high resolution video content, so older devices cannot play current content smoothly anymore.

So.. Nothing about the UX of the PC's main OS going down the toilet?

I wanted a newer m/b + CPU upgrade for my i6700 and looked at Alder Lake or AMD setup to replace my i6700.

Way too pricey.