Answer: nothing
25 replies (most recent on top)
Regarding PC gaming: It's all about the GPU nowadays. 10 year old PC will be just fine if you have just have a good GPU.
Also my 6 year old laptop had twice the battery life of my current Skylake-based one.
Replacing the old HDD with a SSD is sufficient for most old PCs if you are looking for a perf boost.
Chaturbate is all you need
Well a new gaming laptop with a virtual girlfriend is cheaper than an actual girlfriend. Don't need to shower as much either.
Average Joe/Jan and Tom/Dick/Harry when they need to type a report, put a presentation together etc.. or do their taxes still needs a laptop. From what I discovered my 5 year old PC or a 300 dollar laptop do that job pretty well, that is going to be a hard sell to the middle class to spend much on a PC that adds little value versus spending that same money on the next shiny new phone. Samsung showed huge profits again this past year with the new Galaxy, I expect Apple will have blow-out sales with the iPhone7, yeah growth is slowing but the volume for smartphone is so big that TSMC, Samsung and the smaller foundries will have wafer starts that drawf intel in volume. Volume is the virtuous cycle that Intel used 20 years ago to crush everyone and it so laughable that a CEO that is from FSM can't see that the virtuous cycle has now been grabbed by someone else and he continues to pursue that BK structure.
Why does the average person even need a PC anymore?
Smartphones and tablets get the job done.
Internet access is the killer app - no PC required for that. In fact, the PC is a liability in that it is not mobile.
Near double digit sales drop is going to be the norm every quarter and stabilize at about 200 million / year and then rise only as the population rises for the middle class, slim growth prospects. R&D will need big cuts and IoT and 5G and foundry simply can't replace neither the volume nor the revenue and margin.
Yawn....
Still niche.
You know what the hottest game is right now?
Pokemon Go - smartphones only in afraid.
and below, ladies and gentlemen, is why PC is becoming irrelevant. good luck Intel and PC makers!
Win 10
Old desktop still running winxp
Need to switch to umbuta
@IioVQNo-kxn so you believe PCs / laptops are poised for a resurgence, sorry, I think not. Rest assured I agree with you laptops can do so much more, but how many need to upgrade more than once every 4-5 years, not so many. There are how many gamers, young geeks that leverage the latest in the new laptops. Look at what you were issued at work their, I think it works. Business find little need to upgrade iast Haswell laptops do just about everything you need. If you can't get Intel to find a compelling value to upgrade their own employees to Skylake they why the hell does the rest of the world need to, thus the only growth is consumer.
So Joe/jan consumer how much discretionary money do they have for electronics, and intel has to compete against 4K video, xbox, smartphones, tablets, smarthome, drones, etc. etc. I think most people have a laptop that is 4-5 years old, likely works, and thus that is the last thing they upgrade.
Did you see Samsung's recent quarterly results, yup smartphone aren't dead, but PCs are like cars, required but not even as fashionable or status symbol and thus more like a washer and dryer you need it but really could care less if old or new.
No PC volume will slip near double digit again this year.
I call it the virtual spiral of death. PC volumes down, means less revenue/growth, means less R&D, means pushed out silicon schedule, smaller factories, less performance for cloud, etc. etc.
While you got Samsung and TSMC booking huge volumes for next generation smartphone pushing hard on the process and factory capacity. The virtuous cycle has moved from Intel to the ARMy
@ewp many of those are new use-cases, not just features.
DX12 4k gaming is a new thing you can do. You couldn't play a game at 4k resolution 5 years ago. If you haven't seen games and movies at 4k then you're missing out.
HW based video encode/decode is a new thing you can do. New systems make it a breeze to edit video and totally change how it's done, making it available to basically anyone. You can also stream games live on Steam/Twitch/etc. now thanks to HW encoding. You couldn't do this 5 years ago.
Having your laptop with you all day unteathered is a new use-case thanks to 8+ hour battery life. A few years ago you'd hope for 2 hours then look for an outlet or take a pad and paper with you to take notes. Now everybody can share a whiteboard or a document in any meeting because everybody has a charged laptop with them.
Yes, if all you do is Word and Excel on a desktop then PC's are not different at all.
@syp gaming is no longer niche. Over 700k people just watched Liquid vs. Fnatic online in the CS:GO semifinal, with a sold-out 14k in attendance at the arena. That's impressive for people just watching a video game, and not even the finals.
So I hear gaming (niche) and mechanical? Issues.
That's pretty weak sauce right there. No wonder sales are in a tailspin.
Donate it. In a PC there are many other things beside a CPU. What about graphics, display. If you are repairing your old PC then maybe spending more money than buying a new one. I have not come across a 3-4 year old laptop without issues with mechanical problems or general performance issues. On desktops side so much has changed in last 4-5 years... If you and your childrens are in gaming then even Haswell launched in 2013 is old.
You listed a bunch of features.
You didn't tell me what new thing you can do.
MS Office and most Windows apps run exactly the same.
Lose money making it
Possible gold post
LOL LOL LOL
Grease up losers. Bwahahaha
Struck a nerve did I? At least we finally agree that is about all it is good for. Let me know how Oculus works out for you.
One thing you can do with it now and back then. STICK IT UP YOUR ASS
Agreed. The one use this guy has doesn't interest me. And by that I mean virtual porn. But people like that can't go near real women. So fortunately it is a niche market.
Nerd alert!
DirectX 12 4K gaming, hardware based video encode/decode (without a gpu), SSD speed ups of everything, literally all-day laptop battery life (vs 2 hours back then), GFX pipe assisted parallel computing.
There's a lot of new features, but we're moving into niche things, other than gaming improvements.
Dead tech
I haven't bought a PC in about 8 years. Unless you want to work from home, what is the point? I do still have a PC. Somewhere. Haven't looked for it in a few years. By the time it boots up, I've lost interest.