Interesting how smartphone, tablet as well as PC/laptop markets have stopped their growth trajectory or even gone into decline. We seem to have reached some form of market saturation (at least in developed countries) in conjunction with a decline in technical innovation. Producers will need to adapt to the different market dynamics and pressures.
Particularly Apple has not been used to these kind of pressures for a while. Personally, I hope prices will come down a bit. Unsure what else may happen?! A focus on services such as longer warranties or cloud services instead of hardware?
Having said that, my 2+ year old iPhone, 3 year old iPad as well as 2+ year old nexus tablet are still working perfectly fine. Why would I buy a new one if the "old guard" is still more than adequate?
The PC market is 40 years old, so it's a fair bet that, in the developed world, pretty much everyone who wants one has one.
The real problem is that a decent PC will now last five years (on average). This means sales of PCs will halve compared to when they lasted 2.5 years, even if usage stays exactly the same.
If smartphones only last 18 months, smartphones will sell at 3x the rate of PCs even if usage is the same ;-)
Otherwise, I disagree somewhat about the "decline in technical innovation" in the PC market. There's been a huge amount of innovation in Windows (adding apps, touch and pen support, voice-controlled AI, cloud integration etc) and in Windows hardware (smartphones, tablets, 2-in-1s, PC-on-a-stick, all-in-ones etc).
Seems to me the innovation is well ahead of user (and developer) adoption, which may be the real problem....
>he real problem is that a decent PC will now last five years
The real problem is that there are no killer apps driving a need for faster hardware.
PC 1.0 was an office WP/accounts machine
PC 2.0 was a home entertainment, Internet and games machine
PC 3.0 was a pocket/handheld version of 2.0, and is still catching up with 2.0
Meanwhile we're still waiting for PC 4.0.
VR might be a good-enough driver, but I'm not yet convinced people want to use a PC with a giant plastic blob clamped to their heads.
If displays shrink to the point where they're light and unobtrusive, and hardware gets fast enough to have local versions of something like Siri (but smarter and better), full VR/AR could definitely become a 4.0 thing.
Seems to me the innovation is well ahead of user (and developer) adoption, which may be the real problem....
That seems to imply that adoption will eventually follow and it's just a matter of time. On the evidence so far, it seems a credible alternative theory is that most people simply don't want these kinds of innovations.
Unfortunately, the most innovative area in tech today seems to be consumer-hostile but potentially more profitable business models: privacy-invasive and ad-driven systems, rental models for software and cloud services, version ratcheting and built-in obsolescence, DRM and software activation controls, and the list goes on. It's like most big companies in tech can't figure out how to deliver anything valuable enough that users actually want to spend real money on it.
> the most innovative area in tech today seems to be consumer-hostile but potentially more profitable business models: privacy-invasive and ad-driven systems
Google, Facebook and Android seem to be quite popular with consumers.
It certainly seems that consumers don't want to pay for either software or content.
In fact, the old idea of paying programmers to write good software is evil, isn't it? Everything must be free ;-)
Google, Facebook and Android seem to be quite popular with consumers.
While undeniably true, it's not clear how much of that is because they produce inherently good or desirable products, and how much is because they are the default choice or consumers are otherwise pushed to them for reasons not related to actually wanting their product.
For example, it's getting harder and harder to walk into a phone shop and buy a regular feature phone so you can speak to your friend who is somewhere else, so you're getting a smartphone by default. If you don't want an Apple one for whatever reason, there is a good chance you're going to get an Android device, even if you had no particular interest in the Android part of it. There's also a good chance that you're actually paying a huge amount of money for that device even though you're not going to use it for very long, but that you don't know how much because it's disguised within some broader contract for access to a mobile network.
However, you can still get cheap feature phones in the UK. My wife recently bought a Nokia Series 40 to replace one that was stolen. She preferred that to using one of the Android phones or an old iPhone 5 that I no longer use...
The real problem is that surveillance-based advertising generates much higher returns than software sales. Google can easily make $10 to $50 a month from a device where even a Windows PC only makes Microsoft $1 a month, or less.
Particularly Apple has not been used to these kind of pressures for a while. Personally, I hope prices will come down a bit. Unsure what else may happen?! A focus on services such as longer warranties or cloud services instead of hardware?
Having said that, my 2+ year old iPhone, 3 year old iPad as well as 2+ year old nexus tablet are still working perfectly fine. Why would I buy a new one if the "old guard" is still more than adequate?