“Most pundits blame stagnant PC sales on the likewise stagnant economy, or point toward the ascension of smartphones and tablets,” Brad Chacos writes for PCWorld. “Others argue (fairly persuasively) that the flattening of growth is attributable to the idiosyncrasies of PC sales in developing countries, where computers are a rarely replaced luxury item. A second wave, analysts say, has yet to come after an initial surge in sales in those nations.”

“Like most economic sectors, the PC market is influenced by myriad factors, and some truth lies in all three of those explanations,” Chacos writes. “After watching my mother-in-law happily troll Facebook and sling emails on her nearly ten-year-old Pentium 4 computer, however, an even more insidious possibility slipped into my head.”

Chacos writes, “Did CPU performance reach a “good enough” level for mainstream users some years back? Are older computers still potent enough to complete an average Joe’s everyday tasks, reducing the incentive to upgrade?”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Why waste your money on a truck when all you really need is a car?

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. – Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010

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Steve Jobs was right, of course: Tablets are cars and PCs are trucks – January 9, 2013