👋 Good morning! Is gm reserved for the crypto people now?

Computer sales keep rising

Big 3 (plus 1):

• Lenovo, HP, and Dell were the three biggest sellers in the PC market, shipping 24.1%, 21.7%, and 17.4% of all desktops, notebooks, and workstations in 2021.
• Apple landed in fourth with 8.5% market share, but with the highest annual growth at 28.3% uplift, with Acer registering the best growth of the PC players at 21.8% growth.
• That’s despite the chip shortage, which persists.

2022 outlook:

• Strong. Canalys believes shipments will remain strong and the premium end of the market might get a little uplift, “as premium PCs, monitors, accessories and other technology products that enable us to work from anywhere, collaborate around the world, and remain ultra-productive” pick up, according to Canalys Principal Analyst Rushabh Doshi.

More than one PC:

• A point picked up on by Canalys is that people in the developed world now own more than one PC.
• Ishan Dutt, a Senior Analyst at Canalys, in wider comments, pointed this out:
• “PCs are now in the hands of both young students and older family members, while ownership of two or more PCs per person has become more common in developed markets. Since the onset of the pandemic, a larger than normal proportion of PCs shipped have been new additions to the installed base rather than replacement devices, especially in areas such as education and remote works.”
• I’m unsure of what to make of this exactly. Does that mean people have bought a new device to supplement their existing device, say, adding a high-end device for work to their low-end education device?
• Or are people just holding on to an older PC when getting a new one too?

2023-24:

• The replacement cycle for PCs is about 3-5 years, meaning the PC industry has plenty of reasons to expect continued higher sales.
• But will there be a plateau in 2023, 2024, as a certain level of saturation is reached and there are fewer out-of-cycle upgrades?

Roundup

📁 Google’s Pixel Fold, presumed to not launch, still has details emerging: The latest Android 12L beta suggests a stubbier design than its main competition (Android Authority).

👍 2015 NVIDIA Shield TV getting Android 11 now, which is pretty great: the 27th upgrade for the box (Android Authority).

🤦‍♂️ Meanwhile, the realme Pad is less than 6 months old, but won’t be getting OS updates, just security fixes (Android Authority).

👉 Windows Defender is apparently coming to Android, iOS, and Mac(Windows Latest).

🔉 Windows 11 is finally getting a new volume indicator (The Verge).

🍎 “Apple execs: Let’s take a 30% cut of Uber and Lyft’s membership programs” (Twitter).

📈 TSMC sees multi-year growth ahead, to boost chip spending in 2022 by billions more (Reuters).

📈 The daily use of smartphones continues to increase worldwide: up to 4.8 hours a day on average. Users in Brazil, Indonesia, and South Korea surpassed five hours per day. (BBC).

📉 Dutch athletes warned to keep personal phones and laptops out of China: “Dutch team members will be equipped with unused devices in China, to protect their personal data from Chinese surveillance, the sources told De Volkskrant.” (Reuters).

🚗 Here’s why modern cars feel so lifeless to drive (Ars Technica).

🎮 “Cozy Grove saved me while stuck on a train for 35 hours” (Wired).

👴 Reducing air pollution lowers dementia risk, study finds (E&T).

🤔 “ELI5: Why does the same temperature feel warmer outdoors than indoors?” (r/explainlikeimfive)

Throwback Thursday

Yes, it’s been 15 years since the iPhone was first announced, something pretty well looked back on for the past week or two. January 9 was the date back in 2007, when Steve Jobs took the wraps off, with the words: “An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator…are you getting it?”

I didn’t see much new come out of the 15th anniversary: lots of books and interviews have exhausted much of the “…this is what I did working for Steve Jobs” insider stuff. But what is already out there shouldn’t be missed:

• One is a book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, by Fred Vogelstein.
• A sample was published in The New York Times: And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’, which is worth a read (gift link), touching on all manner of launch day topics and background.

Some quotes:

• “Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006. One person who worked on the project thinks Apple then made six fully working prototypes of the device it ultimately sold — each with its own set of hardware, software, and design tweaks.”
• “It was like the first moon mission,” says Tony Fadell, a key executive on the project. (He started his own company, Nest, in 2010.) “I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.”
• The launch also made the time 9:41 AM a kind of touchstone for Apple, seemingly forever.
• This is nice, too: “By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.