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PC Market Sees Its First Growth Quarter in Six Years (venturebeat.com)
From a report: Gartner found PC shipments were up globally in Q2 2018, the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012. Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that's largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.
PC sales began leveling off in the late 1990s, more steeply after 2000. Long before smartphones and tablets.
What happened was Intel and AMD ran headfirst into physics. Prior to 2000, CPU clock speeds had been doubling roughly every 18 months. But the power a processor needs increases non-linearly with frequency. Past about 3 GHz (roughly 2002), CPUs began to require exorbitant amounts of additional power for little gains in clock speed.
Consequently, the rate of clock speed increases nearly stalled after 2002 (at a bit above 3 GHz). Before 2000, each new gen of Intel CPU roughly doubled performance. Today, each new gen only nets about a 5%-15% performance improvement, and most of that has been due to improvements in parallel processing (more cores, speculative execution, hyperthreading, all the goodies which made the news last year as avenues for new exploits).
Up til about 20002, software makers had been counting on increased CPU performance to support the new features they were adding. They relied on people upgrading their PCs to be able to run the latest version of their software. Now that an upgraded PC was barely faster than the PC it replaced, software makers were forced to do something they'd given little thought to in the past - optimize.