Worldwide PC shipments have increased for the first time in six years

Worldwide PC shipments have increased for the first time in six years

Worldwide PC shipments have increased for the first time in six years

The PC market has been shrinking since 2012, with the last period of market growth being in Q1 of that year. Since then many have stated that the “death of the PC is imminent”, thinking that smartphones and tablets would quickly replace the desktops and laptop PCs of yesteryear.  

Fast forward to 2018 and the PC market is far from dead, Microsoft’s Windows 10 has been widely successful, and increased competition from AMD in the CPU market and the growth of PC gaming has given more consumers the desire to replace or upgrade their systems. 

Gartner, a research and advisory organisation, has revealed that PC shipments have grown for the first time in six years, an extremely positive result for the computer industry. This data includes desktop systems, notebooks and ultraportable systems, but excludes products like Chromebooks and iPads. 

The industry’s 1.4% growth may not seem like much, but it is a sign of a partial recovery for the PC market, though we will have to see data from future quarters to see whether or not this growth is a medium-long term trend or a short-term anomaly. 

  
Worldwide PC shipments have increased for the first time in six years(Table from BusinessWire)

Some of this growth can be attributed to the release of AMD’s Ryzen series of processors and Intel’s response with Coffee Lake, giving consumers and businesses a larger performance-based reason to upgrade their systems.

Low-cost/high-performance 6-8 core processors have given both professional and consumers more of a reason to upgrade than any new processor series since 2012, with PC shipment decline happening around a year after the introduction of Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPU architecture. It is arguable that a lack of innovation in the CPU market is a partial reason for why PC sales have declined in recent years. 

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