It is not the interest in PCs declining, it is the PC industry itself in a crisis, Moore's law is dead, hence AMD no longer releases yearly generations, but it takes at least 2 years, sometimes they hold onto some crap products, warm them every 48 months, and forget about what actually the users demand/need.
TSMC no longer offers process improvements. AMD sits on 7 nm when the latest and greatest is 2 nm. AMD used to be the process node pioneer just a decade ago.
Examples: RX 480 relabeled as RX 580/RX 590 and offered for 6 or 7 years, RX 6600 to RX 7600 side grade, RX 5500 to RX 6500 side grade. Same for nvidia with its miserable 5% performance uplifts...
There is no interest in the smartphones, they will never replace the desktop systems.
Actually it is the smartphone that is the driving force behind consumer technology innovation in 2024.
And it should be.
Smartphones are the primary computing modality for consumers in the 2020s. Almost all of the major computing innovations over the past ten years have been popularized on smartphones. Display panel technology, touchscreen, NFC contactless transactions, facial recognition, improvements in wireless communications (cellular data, wifi, Bluetooth), battery technology and power management, cloud services, cameras, video compression, geolocation, AR. Let's not ignore the massive superiority of smartphone SoCs in performance-per-dollar or performance-per-watt metrics.
Sure a high-end PC will end up with higher scores than a premium smartphone but not when considering performance-per-watt.
And it's not just the hardware, it's also software innovation as well that is being driven by smartphones.
AI will be no different. Innovation will be driven on the smartphone. The future of AI isn't going to be what sort of LLM you can run on your power hogging RTX 4090, 5090, 6090, whatever. It'll be about doing stuff on your phone. E-mail/message composition and management. Photo and video editing. Things like auto captioning or tagging. Why do I need to manually tag a photo with my dog's name, AI should prompt me.
Hell, look at ChatGPT. Smartphone apps before desktop computing apps. There's still no native ChatGPT app for Windows, just macOS. But it's not AI, almost all of the OS innovation is on smartphones (partly driven by the rapidly changing hardware technology) whereas PCs fester year after year. PC CPUs with a generation-to-generation 15-20% uplift? PC GPUs with a similar improvement?
Even stuff like search is being made better by AI chatbots. Conventional Google and Bing search is full of SEO-optimized garbage or paid/promoted sites/services. Although still pretty rudimentary AI chatbots are cutting through a lot of this cruft that didn't exist 15 years ago.
And the PC industry has changed massively. I owned an Apple iBook in 2002, my first notebook computer. Twenty-two years later, notebook PCs pretty much do the same thing. And unlike 25 years ago, notebook computers dominate PC sales in 2024, maybe over 80% (it's over 85% for Macs). I have a notebook PC for personal use. It goes weeks unused; it's mostly a travel device but I only fire it up because I have to, not because I want to.
Apple didn't launch the iPhone until 2007 and now smartphones are ubiquitous and have changed the way people use technology on a daily basis. You look at the way young people use technology. The average American teenager is on their smartphone about 4 hours a day, and about 2 hours on TikTok.
And a lot of the phone driven innovation precedes smartphones. The Japanese started using their phones as transit passes in
2005. They were featurephones back then but the NFC IC chip in the JR Suica card was put into phones and people waved them at fare gates. The Japanese also invented emoji to enrich mobile communications. In the late 2000s/early 2010s Japanese designed phones gained water resistance (enough to survive a quick dunk), long before smartphones gained that protection.
Even today, NFC contactless payment via IC card (Suica, Pasmo, etc.) in Japan blows doors over Apple Pay. And now people use their smartwatches for this stuff. Almost none of the payment convenience features that people are so used to today have any importance on PCs. All my daily banking is done on my phone. It has been probably 6-7 years since I paid a credit card bill via a computer.
Anyone who thinks that desktop PCs are the bleeding edge of personal technology innovation in 2024 has their head in the sand. On the enterprise side, everything is being driven by datacenter innovation which is why Nvidia is raking in the big bucks.
PCs will always have a place in Joe Consumer's life but it's an increasingly smaller set of tasks with each passing month. It's amusing to see discussion threads like "I'm buying a new computer and will do some light video editing, will this system handle it?" Well, teens have been shooting and editing 4K skateboarding videos on their smartphones for almost ten years (iPhone 6s had 4K@30fps recording in 2015).
For almost everyone under 30, the PC is something you have to use (apart from gaming) because your employer or school tells you to. Otherwise everything else is pretty much done on the smartphone. This is even more pronounced outside of the USA.
AnandTech was a victim of its own myopic vision of reporting computing technology in 2024. Offering the occasional PSU or CPU cooler review isn't viable anymore. They stayed their original course and thus sailed off into never never land.
AnandTech won't be the last either. I expect other PC tech media sites to fold in the next few years especially if they continue wearing blinders and mostly just focusing on desktop PC hardware. I already see some other sites whose article output has dropped to a trickle.
