Dell, HP Say Windows 8 Is Trashing PC Sales

To hear Dell and HP tell it, the slump in PC sales can be blamed in part on Windows 8, which won't do much to improve the situation until sometime next year.

During conference calls this week to talk about their earnings both Dell and HP pointed to lousy PC sales as a problem. Dell actually came out and said Windows 8 anticipation had resellers drawing down PC inventory, but also acknowledged that any benefit the new operating system will have on sales would be delayed into next year.

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[KentC]

Have you ever seen a Dell Quote?? 600 bucks to even get a motherboard and another 200 to have a service technician see your machine on-site. That's alot of money when you got IT budgets in a chokehold with people doing whatever cheap manuever they can, can't blame a great OS like Windows 8 on the mis-marketed sales semester. Blame it if anything on how high the overall units cost versus meeting up with a guy like myself who will go on Ebay, figure out what technology is upgradable for cheap and doing the freebie route? I'm good with that, I get my dept pissed off since they to me, spend too much even at retailers like Sam's Club and Best Buy who are just moving DELL's and HP's units anyways. Their customer service reps when you call them, even suggest the best option for your personal needs. It's really businesses doing the big spending to keep active directories up to par for workplaces,etc.

I just don't want to hear that DELL and HP are putting the blame on Microsoft, you could market your units with RHEL, or another OS, but would it even do 1/2 as well? Nope.

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

KentC? Forget about Dell totally, I have a laptop I bought from them, and the motherboards failed time after time, and NOW they told me that the last time it went bye_bye, my warranty was nolonger valid. Known issue and rode it out with more and more crap mobos till the warranty expired! F Dell.

 

[pparks1]

KentC? Forget about Dell totally, I have a laptop I bought from them, and the motherboards failed time after time, and NOW they told me that the last time it went bye_bye, my warranty was nolonger valid. Known issue and rode it out with more and more crap mobos till the warranty expired! F Dell.

What model do you have? Like any company, some models do have more issues. Overall, with all Dell's I have used and supported at work and the 2 that I owned at home, I'm happy with them. Sorry your experience has been poor.

 

[Coke Robot]

I had this idea while I was breakfasting today.

I would buy this tablet right away if it was in existence.

Part of the problem with this trend of light and thin is sacrificing hardcore storage, processing, and graphics abilities. Yes, in the future, mobile technology will get smaller and more powerful. But I'm not concerned with CPU or GPU, I'm more on storage here. Since mSATA SSDs are breaching under 1 dollar a gig and such, I'd love to see tablet PCs/ultrabooks with several mSATA ports, maybe three or so; one for the OS, two extra. Now, the two extra can be utilized to pop in maybe, a 256 gig SSD in both and use them with Windows 8's Storage Spaces. Data redundancy on a tablet! A tablet PC!!!

 

[freeky1]

KentC? Forget about Dell totally, I have a laptop I bought from them, and the motherboards failed time after time, and NOW they told me that the last time it went bye_bye, my warranty was nolonger valid. Known issue and rode it out with more and more crap mobos till the warranty expired! F Dell.

What model do you have? Like any company, some models do have more issues. Overall, with all Dell's I have used and supported at work and the 2 that I owned at home, I'm happy with them. Sorry your experience has been poor.

Probably Dell Latitude D600 with NVidia graphics...garbage!

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
Dell could have been "The Amazon" of the computer business. They were magnificent when they started -- you could individually configure exactly what you wanted on your PC, they gave you CD's with the OS and all drivers, and were far cheaper than anybody else.

I in my time have had 3 DELL desktops and all 3 were excellent -- they went the way of other okd hardware as they became too sluggish when newer faster hardware came out and I was using laptops more and more even at work so I didn't need a workstation any more. (In fact my last workstation has now been converted into just a file / print / multimedia server and I can't see myself ever using a workstation again unless it's a server.

They were one of the very few suppliers who kept supplying XP on their machines if customers didn't want VISTA etc.

Now I would suggest they are on a one way trip to nowhere unless they get back to their roots and start supplying people with what they want and "tart up their appalling customer (dis)--service dept --Oh we can't be bothered with actual CUSTOMERS we're too busy logging on to facebook".

In any case "Bog standard" PC's are rapidly becoming a much smaller and probably eventually a niche market and as I posted elsewhere the decline in PC sales has absolutely NOTHING to do with whatever OS is on it.

People can manage all sorts of things WITHOUT a PC for a whole load of stuff these days with smart phones, tablets etc. Even 18 months ago people would have used PC's for casual surfing / email / facebook / twitter / music etc. Now this can be done with relative ease using other devices. -- Seems obvious to me --saying the OS is responsible for the decline in PC sales is just a big load of XXXX (screenshot enc).

(Also hardware is so much improved - you don't need to upgrade to faster machines etc nearly as often any more -- even the smaller intel i3 processor has more than enough "Compute power" than the average "joe" needs and is quite capable of running even fairly large apps like Photoshop quite satisfactorily).

My ideal future compute device would probably be a smart phone which could output video to an external 60 inch lcd TV and be used with a conventional keyboard as well as touch and have say 3 TB of internal storage / or at least be capable of being hooked up to a docking station. Wifi is already built in anyway. !!!! I'm sure Samsung will be thinking about these devices - so even the almighty tablet will be eventually knocked off its perch.

HP will last a bit longer-- nice ENVY series of laptops where you can remove the screen and operate as a tablet, decent printers etc -- and they together with Lenovo seem to have corned the market in supplying Corporations / business sector in general with work type laptops.

Cheers
jimbo