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At a conference last week I was chastised for having an older model laptop. Is me or does anyone else keep their laptop until it no longer works for what I use it for? Windows 8 certainly reinforced that strategy. I have not tried Windows 10 yet even though Microsoft reminds me to quite frequently. And I no longer have a desktop to go with my laptop. I have a tablet to go with my laptop instead.
And isn't this really what is going on in the smartphone and tablet market? We are no longer getting new devices every other year? I did replace my iPad2 with an iPad Pro but only because recent iOS updates crippled it. I did not replace my iPhone 6 however and will wait until the iPhone7, or not.
Another interesting comment at the conference was that the next big thing is "even smarter devices" meaning more computing power will be required. This will be good for the semiconductor industry since smarter means more complex design, more IP, and bigger die sizes.
It also reminded me of an electronics show a long time ago. Andrew Grove CEO of Intel and Bill Gates CEO of Microsoft both gave keynotes. Andy said software will always be the limitation not hardware. Bill of course said hardware will always be the limitation. Both were right at the time of course but today Bill is probably saying "I told you so"!
Dan, in your first paragraph, you said exactly what I have in my office
Now looking at the bar chart explains - it's about 3 years cycle for PC sales. It rises and then falls continuously for 3 years, although in the chart above, during second cycle it's +4, -4, -10 and then -1. For 2015 it's -8, so I guess it will again rise in 2017, may be to -1, 0 or +1, as I have been hearing.
In my personal case, I have to change my laptops in every 3-4 years!
It is going to be the same for mobile, sooner or later.
Let's be honest, it is since 2011 that we do not see a big increase in the IPC for desktop CPUs. It was the Intel Sandy Bridge era at that time, a chip built at 32nm. We have seen 2 more tick and 2 more tock since then, and the introduction of the "amazing" FinFETs, but nevertheless, we just got a miserable 25% increase overall.
The article from Anandtech shows that:
Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge: Average ~5.8% Up
Ivy Bridge to Haswell: Average ~11.2% Up
Haswell to Broadwell: Average ~3.3% Up Broadwell to Skylake (DDR3): Average ~2.4% Up
Broadwell to Skylake (DDR4): Average ~2.7% Up
There is really no need to get a new PC every other year. A jump from Sandy Bridge to Skylake would have been already more than enough. It could be even worse in the future.
Mobile is different, since we still see a huge performance boost every year, power consumption is getting lower and lower and there is a lot of competition out there. It won't last that long, anyway.
Last year I finally updated from my 2011 set up for my home office - a HP laptop. So that is a 4 year turn over rate. The only good news for the company I bought from (Apple) was that I decided to go with a ultra light laptop and a desktop. The easy ability to keep things in sync using the cloud (DropBox) means I can have a powerful machine at home for heavy duty work, and can also just walk out the door with a super light laptop and have all my work related files with me and up to date.
I actually use my five year old laptop these days for pretty much one thing: archiving email in Outlook, and that's mostly for legacy reasons - I have all the way back to 2009 on one machine. I also have Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud to go with Dropbox, so I can work on files if my desktop gets crushed (thank goodness I hoard the original packaging, it came in handy for the move). I don't take a laptop to shows anymore, most of what I do at an event is social media and OneNote - an Android tablet handles that. The tablet is also the TV watching companion and what I use for Chromecast. In other words, it depends on the use case. My daughter works for an agency and has everything on one laptop, no desktop in her house.
I was at a meetup last night where the main point was we have crossed over on browsing - more visits come from mobile devices than from desktop devices now. That trend is not going to reverse anytime in the future.
Intel is talking about slowing down its cadence. Microsoft has already slowed its cadence way down - Windows 10 was 4 years and counting (it's still not fully out, there is a rumor of an ARM release coming). The only reason for existing users to get a new laptop is when the old one literally dies, and then bite off the upgrade to a new OS.
Apple, IMHO, really did themselves a disservice with the iPhone 6s campaign leading with "not much has changed." Even if they're just trying to be clever, that's a bad message to send consumers if you want them to upgrade.
