Comments on: Intel's earnings may portend market health

Disappointing results may be the result of poor planning at the chipmaker, or the start of a PC slowdown.

[NoNoBadDog!]

Intel's Earnings May Portend Market Health

Perhaps it is bacause their rival, AMD, makes a better processor at a better price point. When will Intel finally wake up and move on beyond the P4 architecture?

[GrandpaN1947]

Wait till Windows DRM is unleashed

If you think Intel is hurting now wait until Windows DRM is released. That is when the entire industry heads to the toilet. Who wants to spend thousands of dollars on non functional PC's.

[TyTyson]

umm That's why your next PC will be a Mac...

nt

[ajbright]

Corporate buyers don't care about DRM

Because music and movies have no place in their world.

Users might complain to IT departments that they can't play copied media anymore, but the people in charge won't care less.

The problem here is that around 3/4 of new PCs are bought by corporates, not home users, actually I should say 3/4 of PCs that cost over $1000.

Gaming PCs are still a niche market, not many home users buy $2000-$3000 computers.

Worse, 99% of sheep that buy new computers don't understand anything about how they run and what the implications of Vista will be. Well not until they can no longer backup a DVD or rip a CD without paying a second license fee first.

So those that believe Macs will grab a Firefox style chunk of the market are dillusional, not because the OS and computer are bad products (they're actually pretty good), but because only the more affluent user is going to spend twice the cost for what will appear to them to be the same product.

If they don't understand what Vista and DRM are going to do to their media, they certainly won't understand the value of a more reliable computer with a hassle free OS.

The bottom line is people are sheep and will continue to buy the crap they are shown, as long as the slick bast@rds at electronic superstores show them enough shiny features that won't work because standard models don't come with 2-3GB of RAM and dual core processors.

[scdecade]

Besides gamers

Who needs a more powerful PC? My 5 year old Dell P3 750Mhz is plenty. I've never once wished I had a faster PC. I can access unix servers that have plenty of i/o and cpu if need be.

What's the next killer app for the desktop? Prolly going to be voice recognition? I don't know... I've never wanted to talk to my computer (besides to curse Microsoft) either. I can certainly type as fast of faster than I can speak. Also, I can cut, copy, and paste text. If I had to switch between speaking and cutting, copying, and pasting then it'd definitely be waaaay slower. Yeah, interactive voice will prolly end up in call centers running on servers too.

Intel chips are inferior to AMD too.

[jphillips1868]

Switch to Dual Core to Blame?

Personally, I think its a bad time to purchase a mid to high end PC.

Generally, single core PCs are still faster for single threaded applications than their dual core counterparts. The problem is very few applications are currently dual or multi threaded, especially games.

So you can buy a single core processor for the best performance in the short term, but know you have almost immediate platform obselence or buy a dual core which is slower in the short term in the hopes dual threaded applications will come out before dual cores are faster than their single core counterparts.

Neither is a good choice. When intel comes out with a 4 Ghz dual core, I will start seriously considering a new PC. Until then the market is just in two much transition.

[Vaasman]

Dual Core is for video

I use Vegas video alot, it is multi-threaded and I am seriously thinking about getting an AMD64X2 to take advantage of it, what I am really waiting for is 64 bit to take off, that will really improve performance.

[ajbright]

PCs are just lasting longer

All thats happening is that businesses are holding onto their PCs for longer than they used to.

The old 3 year cycle has been replaced by 5 or 6 year replacement plans, which includes office applications and the OS.

Corporate buyers are finally understanding that there is no difference between Office 95 and Office 2003 except for the 3 anal users that actually do more than type letters and timesheets with Word or Excell.

As for Vista I don't hold out much hope for Microsoft until they finally stop rolling out new patches for older operating systems.

At the moment large numbers of corporate users are still using Win2000 or even NT4, but are gradually moving to WinXP due to security issues.

However even if they buy new workstations with Vista, the chances are they will downgrade those systems to WinXP for the sake of compatibility (you are allowed to regress your OS two versions under most corporate license agreements) and will not even consider a move to Vista until the first service pack has been released and fully tested by IT departments.

So with faster processors extending the life of PCs, and with software upgrades appearing to have no real business benefit, the market that buys at least 3/4 of new PCs is going to slow to a steady trickle.

The only good news is that because it usually costs more to support a PC older than five years than it does to buy new, there will still be a reasonable market, but nothing like the boom years of the late 90s.