Quote:The past year has not been particularly good for the PC industry as a whole. Despite the launch of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 OS and various hardware releases, PC shipments have continued to fall, facing heavy pressure from mobile devices and tablets. Some firms have been hit hard, with Micron for instance, reporting poor financials among others. There does appear to be a few bright spots though, with gaming related sales up, and for Nvidia AiB partners such as Asus, eVGA and Zotac in particular, this has meant increased profits.

Quote:"13% of Americans are now “smartphone only” -- meaning they have a smartphone but lack traditional broadband service at home," notes Pew. "And nearly one-third of these “smartphone only” users say that the main reason they don’t have broadband at home is because their smartphone can do everything they wish to do online."

The problem of course is that as those users increasingly use bandwidth-intensive services like streaming video, they're going to find themselves pressed tightly up against wireless industry usage caps. Unlimited data is becoming an increasingly rare dinosaur for smart phone users, with at least one of the final two major carriers offering it (Sprint) hinting it will stop the practice sooner rather than later.

33% of those without traditional fixed-line broadband cite cost as the primary reason, something that's obviously not going to be cured by switching to a more expensive and more heavily capped broadband platform.

(01-14-2016, 02:12 AM)SteelCrysis Wrote: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/221179-pc-sales-fall-to-lowest-level-since-2007-analysts-hope-for-2016-recovery
This decline is serious.

(01-14-2016, 02:15 PM)BoFox Wrote: Yeah, personally I find PC to be a bit boring these days.  The 28nm fabbing tech was around for like forever.  The games aren't so exciting while the devs focus on making next-gen console games designed for the consoles first and foremost.  Even Rollo here never really used his GTX 980 Ti...  Perhaps it's just me as I get older and more busy with more kids/babies to take care of, but I'm finding the portable stuff to take a lot of excitement away from the PC.  It's funny how I was nuts about PC gaming during the late 90's and early 2000's, but now a tablet or high-end phone can handle better graphics than say, Star Wars KOTOR and Elder Scrolls Morrowind (although Morrowind had amazing artwork and expansive content for its generation).