Ever since the introduction, and general take-up of the tablet, it has been speculated that the death of the PC is nigh. But is this the case? According to IDC, global PC sales fell 13.9% in Q1 2013, accelerating the drop of 8.3% in Q4 2012. Certainly less are being sold, and for this there are many reasons.
A fundamental reason for this, and I believe we’ll be seeing this very shortly with smartphones and tablets, is that PCs have become like ‘white goods’. You don’t throw away your fridge or cooker when a new model comes out, and the same has become the case with the PC. Given the slowdown of processor improvements, and how well Windows 7 runs on older machines, consumers are no longer buying a new PC every couple of years to keep up. RAM is still very cheap and given the prevalence of 64bit Windows 7, it’s easy to put in another 4 or 8GB of RAM to improve performance.
Another reason for keeping an aging machine is cloud services. If...