PC sales this year might be slightly better than expected, says IDC

Himanshu Arora

Posts: 902   +7

Worldwide PC shipments will continue to fall this year, but the downturn is slowing, according to a study published yesterday by IDC. The market research firm said that shipments of desktop and portable PCs are likely to fall by 6 percent this year, which is slightly better than its earlier forecast of 6.1 percent.

Although a change of 0.1 percent might seem negligible, it could mean the difference between a million units shipped, and could also affect vendor rankings. It also means the forecast will unlikely turn to be more pessimistic than anticipated.

The changed forecast stems from a recovery surge in Western Europe, as well as slightly better-than-expected sales in other markets. Favorable factors for the PC market include slowing tablet demand and steadying economic indicators that are contributing to more stable PC shipments in mature markets.

In addition, Windows XP replacement activity, that has boosted shipments in the past several quarters, is also expected to remain a positive factor in the near future.

However, the outlook for PCs is still bleak in absolute figures. IDC expects 129.7 million desktops to ship this year, down from 136.7 million in 2013. On the other hand, shipments of portable PCs will reach 166.6 million, down from 178.4 million.

By 2018, portable PC shipments are expected to be just slightly up at 168.3 million, while desktop shipments will fall even further to 119 million, the report notes. The research firm expects refresh projects and continued growth in underserved areas to bring modest growth in emerging PC markets by 2016.

It should be noted that IDC's figure takes into account shipments of PCs from manufacturers to stores, and not stores to consumers.

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PC sales declining is old news. Most people used to have a computer for just checking email and facebook. Tablets and less powerful smaller devices are naturally more suitable for this so they no longer buy desktop machines. That paired with the fact that performance improvements in chipsets and processors are not worth spending the money for if you have a reasonably modern PC. Mostly hardcore gamers and benchmarkers trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from a platform are going to be upgrading. I made my Intel Q6600 last about 6 years, and now my i7 2600K is in it's 4th year of use and still nothing is prompting me want to upgrade it.
 
I buy an 8 core mac pro 3.2 ghz and 10 gigs of ddr2-800 ram. Can slap in 4 4 tb hard drives. I can run 8 operating systems at the same time with parallels or vmware. I don't foresee myself upgrading to a pc anytime soon. I also got 30 inch display all this for 800. So no I will not buy a monitor that is 4k for 4000 and will not buy a pc for 2000. And will not build one either for 1000. Next 8 years I will just read about it. Let me know when they build one that uses light. hahaha. Also 2 neno meters tech for shrink.
 
PC sales declining is old news. Most people used to have a computer for just checking email and facebook. Tablets and less powerful smaller devices are naturally more suitable for this so they no longer buy desktop machines. That paired with the fact that performance improvements in chipsets and processors are not worth spending the money for if you have a reasonably modern PC. Mostly hardcore gamers and benchmarkers trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from a platform are going to be upgrading. I made my Intel Q6600 last about 6 years, and now my i7 2600K is in it's 4th year of use and still nothing is prompting me want to upgrade it.
You can blame the Xbox 360 and PS3 for the lack of interest in better hardware in PCs. To this day developers still work around hardware from 9 years ago.

Gaming has always been the driving force for PC hardware, as it will also be the driving force for tablets and cell phones. You never needed anything faster then a Pentium II to be able to do Facebook or check email. For that matter, you certainly don't need a quad core ARM cpu in your tablet either. There are no applications that can make good use of all the processing power they put in those tablets, and if there is an application that can then it'll get too hot to touch.

Slowly people are going back to the PC, because of gaming. Also tablets and smartphones are locked down harder then a butt hole with constipation. Probably the reason why Apple is declining faster then anyone else right now.
 
Companies only put quad cores and 900cores in tablets/phones because they cant be bothered to optimize the product so they slap more cores and ram in it.

Also This year the IDC will make non-stop articles about sherlock holmes and how they are posting the blatantly obvious so intelligent people understand that the IDC are useless and dont know a thing about sales.

Also this year wastedkill predicts pc sales will go up and down due to people wanting to replace old hardware and others having a pc they are fine with that dont see the point in an upgrade, Wastedkill also predicts that sales will go up and down each month and the IDC will continue to post nonsense each and every year.
 
Looks like a great year for me. All the stuff I want is coming out. My old i5 and 660ti will be replaced by broadwell and maxwell. Maybe 2015 if my stuff doesn't make it by the end of the year.
 
In our household we have purchased 2 PCs and only a single tablet. Does this make us unusual?
 
These predictions are dead wrong. PC sales will continue to slump until the medium is completely phased out. No one wants a dirty giant dust gathering box in their house anymore. Get with the times tech companies and start producing something truly innovative instead of slapping crappy on-die graphics with very pathetic cpu speed upgrades each year in turd boxes that no one wants to use anymore.
 
My house has a PC with 6TB of storage (will add even more HDD in the future) with HD movies connected to my 4k HDTV. I even have a powerful Nvidia GTX gaming PC in my room for all my gaming entertainments.

For those PC haters who keep saying tablets & smartphones are the future, I'd say try play Battlefield 4 or Crysis 3 on your "innovative" devices, and I will be impressed.
 
These predictions are dead wrong. PC sales will continue to slump until the medium is completely phased out. No one wants a dirty giant dust gathering box in their house anymore. Get with the times tech companies and start producing something truly innovative instead of slapping crappy on-die graphics with very pathetic cpu speed upgrades each year in turd boxes that no one wants to use anymore.
What's truly innovative about tablets and smart phones? I'm guessing you're referring to those devices as the new superior PC replacement. They seem innovative but are far from it. What's so special about a device that's locked down and comes with hardware that's far weaker then typical x86 CPUs?

You're looking at the aftermath of two huge industry blunders. First being the Xbox 360 and PS3 dominating the gaming industry for nearly 9 years. Second is Intel dominating AMD for nearly a decade. Developers are so afraid to develop games outside of the 360/ps3 comfort zone that even the new consoles don't get new unique titles. And since these systems lack CPU power more so than GPU, the result is desktop CPU's becoming less important for PC gaming. To the point that ARM is now consider good enough for everyday computing, even though you couldn't run Crysis on any of them still.

Intel is so far ahead of AMD that they don't care about improving performance, so much as improving battery life. The last 5 years of Intel CPU's have been so minor in performance that a lot of people still run Q6600's and what not. While AMD seems to take one step forward and two steps back. But ARM is still the king of low power CPU's, even though the trade off is in performance.

But the OS in these devices are still a problem. Anyone trying to put a custom rom on their Android phones knows it's not as easy as sticking a usb memory stick in your desktop PC and running the installer. You usually have to do some sort of voodoo dance to get it unlocked enough to put in your own. Most people wouldn't do that, but it doesn't take long to see the locked down nature of iOS and Android before crawling back to your more open PC.

So in summery neither Android or iOS devices are open. They're super expensive and you get something that can't play Crysis and has the storage capacity of a Nintendo 64 cartridge. Which makes the device dependent on cloud storage which most companies think it's not a problem, until you venture away from your home only to discover your data plan ran out of bandwidth, and wifi is as spotty as the corn in your fecal matter.

So it's easy to see that once you tablet then you'll probably want to go back to desktop or laptop.
 
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