Here We Go Again
Stu:
John Gruber isn’t a gamer. He’s talked about it on The Talk Show. Dan Benjamin even said, “I can’t imagine you playing a video game,” to Gruber, which I thought was somewhat offensive: John Gruber doesn’t seem like the type of guy who plays video games, and Benjamin thinks Gruber is pretty swell, thus Benjamin may have a negative opinion of gamers.
In the spirit of giving you the benefit of the doubt, I’m assuming you’re being facetious.
But anyway. Apparently both AMD and Nvidia are claiming that their graphics card sales have lagged because of the hard drive shortages in Thailand. Gruber turns this topic, about an industry he knows nothing about and does not participate in, into some sort of anti-Windows PC troll:
Sure, that’s the explanation — not that demand for Windows PCs is drying up. I’m surprised Nvidia couldn’t make up the difference with Tegra 2 chipsets that powering all those best sellers on the “non-iPad tablets” list.
Clearly the claims by AMD and Nvidia are false, or at least not wholly truthful. The demand for Windows PCs is going down overall, but as you pointed out, they still represent the vast majority of computers sold. Gruber ties the two together. Lower-than-expected sales of the products you supply is sure to decrease your quarterly profits.
If you have an apple orchard and sell some of your product directly, and some to juicing companies, you’re going to expect revenue from both streams. If there’s a contamination scare of apple juice and sales go down, you’re going to lose money if you can’t shift the product you earmarked for the juicers to produce stands.
I thought the snarky comment about the Tegra 2 was a nice touch.
Or, if you actually use graphics cards regularly and have for the last 12 years like I have, you’d know that recent graphics cards are so powerful that the upgrade cycle on them has been diminished considerably.
In the past you were looking at a new card once every 2 years, maybe 3 years if you didn’t care. Now even a mid-range fairly cheap graphics card can last over 3 years, if not more. My last graphics card lasted something like 4 years before I really felt like I needed to upgrade. (In general the hardware upgrade cycle on PCs for gamers has diminished considerably, along with the prices.)
Is your point that only gamers buy graphics cards? I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, remember, and last I checked, most computers had graphics cards. OEMs buy Nvidia and AMD cards in high volume, contributing significantly to their revenue. In fact, the All Things D article cited by The Verge which was cited by Gruber notes that almost exactly:
Nvidia said the shortfall was caused in part by the PC-market impact from a global hard-drive shortage brought on by flooding in Thailand. As a result, fewer systems were shipped, and some PC makers opted to scale back on graphics to account for their higher hard-drive costs.
Computers that were originally going to ship with discrete graphics instead shipped with integrated graphics. Gaming rigs aren’t the only computers that ship with discrete graphics, either. Two out of the three models that make up Dell’s consumer desktop Inspiron line have discrete graphics. A number of HP’s, Toshiba’s and Acer’s consumer desktops also have separate cards. I didn’t even look at each company’s gaming line.
What strikes me as especially silly coming from Gruber, is suggesting that slowing sales of a niche product (GPUs, used primarily by gamers) is somehow indicative of the entire Windows PC atmosphere.
Oh, that was your point. See above.
It couldn’t possibly be that consoles are cutting into how many gamers care about their GPUs, right? Or any number of other possible factors?
Like a decrease in PC sales?
Nah, Gruber will just say the iPad—which isn’t a suitable gaming replacement for PC/console gamers and should have little to nothing to do with GPU sales—is cutting into PC sales. That’s definitely the narrative he likes to pick. If you want to say that, GPU sales are not the metric to use to support it.
The Tegra 2 has been used in a number of Android tablets, something Gruber alluded to by comparing sales of them (and therefore sales of Tegra 2s) to sales of iPads. That was his point.
I guess your counterargument will be that high-end graphics cards are the big revenue generators, and since gamers are having to replace their expensive cards less frequently, that cost Nvidia and AMD in revenue. But I would wager that these cards never generated the revenue of high-volume average-consumer-level cards.
I don’t fully agree with the logic Gruber used. I think he stretched a few things to make a point, but he could be as sarcastic as you were in the first paragraph. Also, it’s Friday, and it’s far too much effort to look up Nvidia and AMD sales breakdowns for the past few years to solidify my point in the previous paragraph, but it seems pretty solid to me.
