PC Market Shows Signs of Recovery (betanews.com)

PC shipments will continue to decline in 2016, according to a new IDC forecast, but the drop will be slightly lower than previously expected. What's more, things will improve even more in 2017. BetaNews adds: IDC expects PC vendors to ship a total of 258.2 million units this year, a figure which would be 6.4 percent lower than last year. The previous estimate was a 7.2 percent fall, which IDC announced in August. Growth will still be negative in 2017, but shipments are expected to decrease by just 2.6 percent compared to this year. IDC believes that commercial shipments of notebooks will grow this year, while desktops should stay flat in terms of growth. The pressure from mobile devices is said to decrease as the markets mature. The tablet market, in particular, is not as big of a concern or threat as it sees declining shipments as well. "The PC market continues to perform close to expectations", says IDC Worldwide Tracker Forecasting and PC research vice president Loren Loverde. "Some volatility in emerging regions is being offset by incremental gains in larger mature markets while the interaction with tablets and phones is stabilizing. We continue to see steady progression toward smaller desktops and notebooks as replacement buying helps stabilize overall shipments in the coming years".

Comments

Re:Wait until they find out

[mark-t]

I think when mobile matures to the point of being fully functional as a PC replacement

Which will be never.... advances to technology that might otherwise place mobile tech more in line with desktop pcs tend to improve the performance of desktop pc's as well, so the target of being on par with the desktop is a moving one that cannot be reached unless somehow progress was only being made to improve the mobile platform experience that didn't also improve the performance of desktops as well.

{game of the year}

[watermark]

I'd switch to Linux if it could play {game of the year}. Until it plays that game without much Wine hassle, I can't see myself switching.

Its the content creators that need them!

[Stu101]

So I know a lot of people do Facebook, Twitter etc but for those of us that work doing any form of content creation of value desktops beat out most of the competition. For example... I am writing a white paper at the minute and doing so on a desktop. With a decent amount of grunt, good keyboard and dual monitors I can do stuff so much quicker than any other device, esp for media intensive ops.

There will always be a place for desktops.

Re:Its the content creators that need them!

[tepples]

a display as big as you can handle

A huge display isn't very useful if the smartphone-derived operating system's window manager doesn't allow displaying more than one app at once on that display.

Say you have a network connection via some form of wireless that gives you 10gb or more

And once I've burned through those 10 GB, which would take eight seconds at 10 Gbps, what else can I do for the rest of the month before my data plan resets?

Not suprising

[110010001000]

Moore's Law is dead. Lone gone and buried. There is no compelling reason to replace your PC at this point.

Re:Not suprising

[The-Ixian]

Well. the nice thing about a PC is that it is modular, you can replace the parts that wear out.

I am still rocking my AMD 8 core rig from 4 years ago and it still runs modern 3d games at a decent frame rate at 5760x1080 resolution.

I expect the hard drives, GPU and power supply will last through at least another rev of the hardware when I replace the mobo, ram and CPU.

Re:Wait until they find out

[Higaran]

Mobile will never fully replace the PC market, yes your phone might have plenty of CPU power, but when you get to your office you're not going to work on massive spread sheets or do hours of data entry on it. Phones and tablets might replace most PC's for home use, but they are realistically just a supplement to the pc's of the business world.

Interesting definition of 'recovery'

[unixisc]

PC shipments will continue to decline in 2016, according to a new IDC forecast, but the drop will be slightly lower than previously expected

One of the most imaginative definitions of 'recovery' that I've ever seen. It's like a kid who went from an A to a C in one term, and C to a D in the next, and claims that he's 'improved' b'cos he didn't go from C to an F.

Almost like how in Washington DC, baseline budgeting is done. If you are spending $100M on something and a proposal is made to raise it to $125M, but instead, the expense is only raised to $115M, then it's called a 'cut'. Nobody defines numerical shifts that way, excepting people in government... and market analysts

Re: Wait until they find out

[gtall]

Yeah, yer right, no one would think to give those whizzy new interface devices their own power supply. Sheesh, docking stations are...what...inconceivable.

Re:Wait until they find out

[Anne Thwacks]

A real thin client deployment should have full management backing and a concrete criteria for establishing "need" for a thick PC

Way to go - sabotage the volume sales of PCs - that will help the prices a lot.

I'll give up my desktop just as soon as I can have a 32inch 4K screen, full size hardware keyboard and an internal 1/2" tape drive on my phone. I have an A3 duplex colour printer and my current UPS weighs 40kg - OK, so its not very portable. I work at a desk, and then I stop working and go somewhere else. You may want to work 24 hours a day. I don't.