Declining PC Sales Not Derailing SSD Market in 2012
With the PC market taking a downward turn in 2012, the SSD market still finds itself on an upward trend
As we reported earlier, IHS iSuppli forecast the PC market to have a 1.2 percent decline in 2012, which will be the first decline in 11 years. With the diversified of SSDs, its growth outlook has only decreased slightly, even with the ultrabook shipments being behind expectations and the sobering outlooks provided by Intel and AMD.
SSD shipments in the first half of this year amounted to 12.9 million units, according to IHS iSuppli. Shipments reached 10.5 million in the third quarter and will rise to 17.5 million units in the fourth quarter, for a total of 28.0 million units in the second half. This is down from the previous forecast of 13.0 million in the third quarter and 20.0 million in the fourth. Even though the units shipped didn't meet expectations, it is still double the total number shipped during the first half of the year. 
The shipment date provided by IHS cover pure standalone SSDs as well as drives that are used with HDDs as separate cache entities. The numbers cover all applications for SSDs, including but not limited to the enterprise segment, ultrabooks and consumer units.
The long-term outlook of SSDs still holds a positive position due to improvements like NAND die shrinks, increasing utilization of TLC flash, and more efficient controllers that are accelerating the cost curve. Information collected by ISH showed the second quarter of the year closed with 7.1 million SSDs being shipped for $1.5 billion in revenue. In addition, IHS predicts that by the second half of this decade, SSDs with be the standard storage in non-budget notebook and desktop PCs, thanks to a mixture of lower prices, consumer education and an optimized software ecosystem.
IHS projects the SSD industry will finish 2012 with $7.5 billion in revenue and 41.0 million in shipments, with compound annual growth rates of 35 percent in revenue and 69 percent in shipments.
the laptop in question is a HP DV8 fitted with a cheap OCZ agility3 120GB SSD.
i believe so.
I also think if the PC market goes the way its going and they push the ITX form factor we may end up with motherboards coming out with SSD's soldered onto the boards which can be used as cache drives.
SSD are cheap.
For the PC sale declining no suprise. They try to sell you a $600-650 laptop for $1,400 telling you it's because it's SLIM. Everybody want slim laptop but no one want to pay so much for a laptop WITHOUT any nvidia/ati videocard. Just check the new HP Envy that you have see in a pub at the theater.... $1,400 bucks!!!
At the end, they also raised their $600-650 not slim model for $900.
So you think it twice before buy one.
HP, Lenovo, Dell,.... Declining sales but they make more profit by sale. They choice this path. So this probably change nothing for them.
And a desktop cost almost the same price as before... and you don't need right now to change it.
As for PC sales slowing down - this is not solely due to hardware exceeding software demands. Its also tied in predominantly with automation taking over and companies finding it more cost-effective (not to mention efficient) compared to human labor (which they are finding increasingly harder to justify).
From a technological/resource point of view, this could have been done decades ago, but since we live in an economy where money and cost dictate everything, companies wait until technologies become cheap enough for them to implement (which they will do mainly if they see they can profit from it).
But, the amount of people losing their jobs is increasing in speed - purchasing power is only going to go further down, and people won't be able to re-educate themselves to do something else fast enough because technology will outpace them (we cannot 'compete' with machines in this).
In numerous situations, 3d design based software can easily push existing hardware to its limits and far beyond - and with the advent in 3d printers, such software is likely to become increasingly more commonplace.
10 or 15 years ago, you'd buy a very expensive high-end computer just to notice that after all you paid, it was still much slower and instable than expected (especially once you installed all your fonts/softwares/... on the PC). Editing photos/videos was not very pleasant and the 3D performances fell always short.
Now, you can still work with a three years Windows 7 old mid-range PC and feel that it's largely sufficient for what you do. It won't overheat, has enough storage and runs at a good speed.
Take a 4 years old PC with Vista, replace the boot drive by a cheap SSD, upgrade it to Windows7 and you get the feeling that you have a state of the art brand new machine !
PC markets are in decline because tablets and smartphone takes over some of the everyday tasks. A PC is generally good for hardcore gaming and other demanding tasks that requires a more specialized software.
-IvanTO
It's especially important considering how much manufacturers are charging for SSDs. Dell wants $500 for a 256GB drive in many of their laptops, while the general market is sitting at
My laptops are all either dual-core with HT or true quad cores. They have between 8 and 16 GB of RAM, and all of them can run Google Earth well, play 1080p without problems and have real world battery life over 3 hours (much more when being conservative). Until something breaks, I am sticking with what I have...
I am not alone.
I just got someone to upgrade their dual core Core based laptop with 2 GB of RAM to a SSD instead of getting a new computer. It amazed him.
I am doing it for someone else soon. I expect no less than WOW.
Sure, would a new i7 Ivy Bridge be nice? Sure. But I have no need for it.
At work, I just got upgraded to a Crucial M4, 8 GB of RAM, and Windows 7 64 on a 1st generation i5 laptop. I am happy as a clam. Going from a Scorpio Blue and Windows 7 32, it is like night and day.
Our needs now are improved internet bandwidth. Mine is very good. But I want fiber.