Traditional PC Sales Continue To Slide (zdnet.com)

Sales of traditional PCs continue to decline, although the overall PC market is likely to grow slightly next year. From a report: Traditional PC shipments are forecast to drop by nearly eight percent this year, and another 4.4 percent in 2018, predicts analyst firm Gartner. Which means that, by 2019, 16 million fewer traditional PCs and notebooks will be sold than were shipped this year. However, much of this will be offset by the rise in spending on high-end notebooks like Microsoft's Surface and Apple's MacBook, so that the overall PC market will by 2019 be at pretty much the same level it was last year. Tablets -- defined by Gartner as basic and utility ultramobile devices -- will also decline over the period to 2019.

Comments

NVMe and M.2 ports will likely boost PC sales

[RobinH]

I opted to just install an SSD rather than upgrade our PCs at home, and definitely got a few extra years out of them. However, the SSDs are maxing out the data rate of the SATA ports, and now they're coming out the NVMe drives that are 4 times faster than SSDs but you need an M.2 port (as I understand it a direct connection into your PCI bus). For these you typically need a new motherboard. So whereas the upgrade from an HDD to an SSD was very simple and easy, taking the next step means a new motherboard, so if you were already delaying buying a new PC because you did the SSD thing, you're almost certainly going to buy a new PC next time. There's a lot more incentive now.