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The number of PCs shipped by manufacturers has notably fallen in the US according to new estimates. There’s also a surprising dip in the global figure.
There’ve been two separate sets of figures from rival analysts, each looking at April through June this year and comparing the results both to forecasts and to the equivalent figures last year.
IDC forecast a global rise of 2.1 percent, but the figure actually dropped 0.1 percent to 86.7 million. It also expected a 4.4 percent drop in the US, with the real decline turning out to be 11 percent. Rivals Gartner puts the US figure as a 6 percent drop, while mirroring the 0.1 percent drop for global sales.
The global figure being virtually unchanged isn’t really a case of the industry “holding up in tough times.” Generally you’d expect worldwide sales to continually increase through a combination of more people being able to afford PCs in developing markets and the sheer growth of the population.
There are several ready-made excuses, including the ongoing economic woes in many developed nations and the effects of people putting off buying a new machine until Windows 8 is released. It’s also possible that, as the figures are for shipments rather than sales, we’re still seeing the results of severe hard drive shortages in Asia. It could also be that poor sales in earlier periods have meant there’s less demand for stock replenishment.
When it comes to long-term trends however, the most notable point is that the figures only cover shipments of traditional desktop and laptop PCs and excludes tablets. IDC says sales of ultrabooks (very slim and light notebooks with long battery life) have been unimpressive, with the price too high for many buyers.
It still seems too early to say that tablets will replace traditional PCs. However, it certainly seems more and more likely that people who’d previously have bought a laptop as a second machine but mainly used it for web browsing and watching video are finding a tablet a better option
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