| Bofferbrauer said: Not necessarly. The sales of PC hardware, which is the number that has been going down, is calculated by the total sum of $ worth. Thing is, if you bought a halfway decent processor with Sandy Bridge (i5/7 2xx0, released January 2011) or later, there has been no need to buy a new CPU yet. Especially the OEM market, which is the bulk of the PC hardware market (most companies use them for their PCs), suffered from this. This also meant that they could forego the expensive top-of-the-line models and choose cheaper ones instead. Graphics cards have also stagnated during that period due to having been limited to the 28nm process for so long. Also, APU/iGPU also mean for OEMs that they don't necessarly sell dedicated graphics cards anymore for standard office PCs, further reducing the financial value of the sales. Long story short: If one does not need to upgrade or replace the hardware, hardware sales naturally suffer from this. The home PC market is minuscule compared to the OEM market in therms of hardware value and thus it's growth doesn't really weights into the total hardware sales statistics. Besides, sales went actually up last year for the first time in 7 years (the start of the netbook craze was the reason back then), if not by much and not everywhere, but still up. |
Thank you Brauer, I apreciate you took the time, makes a lot of sense
