“I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
Thomas Paine
February 12, 2020 - MWC 2020: Smartphone showcase cancelled over coronavirus fears
February 17, 2020 - Apple Signals Coronavirus’s Threat to Global Businesses
The big Phone show of the year, cancelled because of " coronavirus fears "! (Wipes tears of laughter from eyes) Ah, mirth. Government-made designer virii, is there anything they can’t do?
Saying the dog ate your homework doesn’t get you out of doing your homework.
Put a fork in them, these guys are done.
I’m also basing that latter statement on the fact that device shipments dropped between 12% and 16% internationally from 2005 to 2019.
We must recall that these devices are held to be as essential as cars or houses.
I think the fact that I’ve spent my career recruiting and hiring IT developers is perhaps the most spectacular irony of this whole story. But then I’ve always been Peter Gibbons, from the Mike Judge film " Office Space ."
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When that film was made in 1998, I was working at an IT Consulting firm, hiring the programmers who were “working on the 2000 switch”.
1998 was the year the spray planes flew over our new office building for the first time. I made a coworker of mine come look. She put her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room. Those first few days they were at a really low altitude, but quickly went to higher elevation. Because girls were running out of the room with their hands over their mouhts.
It’s amazing how beautiful the world has become in just twenty years.
The other day, I got on a web meeting for my new job. I had the camera on my laptop activated, of course. At the startup I worked at most recently, everyone had their camera on, every meeting. I thought it a hateful practice, but that is was “just the way it was, now”, with our company’s remote work force.
But here I was stunned to see that not a single person used their camera . As a bonus, two brightly said “I dialed in , because I always have trouble with the technology.” I quickly turned my camera off, and went back to the web-enabled phone meeting.
Mark my words, the next step is “face to face”.
I can’t wait to see where this all goes next.
Jeff Miller, Brooklyn, New York, February 20, 2020
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July 30, 2016 - Apple’s sales decline sends smartwatch market sharply down.
Global sales of smartwatches suffer as consumers hold out for next-generation models with better features
October 25, 2016 - Smartwatch sales show sharp decline, report finds
Smartwatch shipments declined by almost 52% year-on-year,
January 16, 2017 - Smartwatch market to surge 40% by 2020
December 25, 2017 - Wearable technology still isn’t being adopted by consumers at a fast rate. The research firm eMarketer predicts use will grow only 11.9% in the next year
January 21, 2020 - Gartner: 2020 device shipments to grow 0.9% to 2.16B thanks to 5G, before 2 further years of decline
The analysts at Gartner have published their annual global device forecast, and while 2020 looks like it may be partly sunny, get ready for more showers and poor weather ahead. The analysts predict that a bump from new 5G technology will lead to total shipments of 2.16 billion units — devices that include PCs, mobile handsets, watches, and all sizes of computing devices in between — working out to a rise of 0.9% compared to 2019.
That’s a modest reversal after what was a rough year for hardware makers who battled with multiple headwinds that included — for mobile handsets — a general slowdown in renewal cycles and high saturation of device ownership in key markets ; and — in PCs — the wider trend of people simply buying fewer of these bigger machines as their smartphones get smarter (and bigger) .
As a point of comparison, last year Gartner revised its 2019 numbers at least three times, starting from “flat shipments” and ending at nearly four percent decline. In the end, 2019 saw shipments of 2.15 billion units — the lowest number since 2010 . All of it is a bigger story of decline. In 2005, there were between 2.4 billion and 2.5 billion devices shipped globally.
“2020 will witness a slight market recovery,” writes Ranjit Atwal, research senior director at Gartner . “Increased availability of 5G handsets will boost mobile phone replacements, which will lead global device shipments to return to growth in 2020.
January 28, 2020 - Gartner Says Worldwide Smartphone Sales Will Grow 3%
February 11, 2020 - China’s Smartphone Sales Predicted To Fall By 30-50% in Q1
February 12, 2020 - MWC 2020: Smartphone showcase cancelled over coronavirus fears
February 17, 2020 - Apple Signals Coronavirus’s Threat to Global Businesses
