Peak PC? Shipments for personal computers are falling

10/11/22 8:00PM

On again, off again

‍Whether they were devices for distraction, work-from-home workhorses, or school-assigned study tools, personal computers were a hot commodity during the pandemic, with nearly 350 million shipped in 2021 — a near 10-year high.

As workers and students returned to normality, however, so did the figures for PC shipments. Indeed, waning sales and supply chain issues have blighted the industry this year with shipments falling in every quarter, most recently down 15% in Q3 according to new data from the IDC’s device tracker.‍

‍**Peak PC?**‍

Despite slightly different shipment counts, analysts from IDC and Gartner agree that this year’s drop offs are the most-extreme since data began to be collected in the mid-90s, regardless of which way you cut the figures.

As we split our time between various-sized screens, with smartphones and tablets becoming increasingly powerful, it’s not outlandish to say we might have seen “peak PC” even if shipment volumes are still above pre-pandemic levels. The industry isn’t in shut down mode just yet, but it is running a little slower than it did last year.

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OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

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The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

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