Gartner and IDC Agree: Global PC Shipments Fell To Exactly 58.5 Million in Q1 2019 (venturebeat.com)

The PC market is still in decline, according to research firms Gartner and IDC. That's nothing new for the duo to agree on, but coincidentally they also (for the first time?) estimated the exact same number of PC shipments: 58.5 million in Q1 2019. From a report: Gartner and IDC also both found PC shipments were down globally year-over-year. So far, 2019 looks like more of the same. After six years of quarterly PC shipment declines, 2018 brought a positive Q2, a flat Q3 ... and then a negative Q4. Gartner and IDC analysts have pointed to CPU shortages as contributing to this past quarter's decline. But that just seems to be an excuse for reality: The PC simply isn't as in-demand as it once was. The top six vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Asus, and Acer, per Gartner.

Comments

They have reached equilibrium

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't in as much demand, but there is s significant demand. But a combination of slow innovation, and being split with virtual machines, laptops, cell phones and tablets has put their demand in check.

I wont give mine up, but i don't have 6 of them anymore either, and only upgrade every 3-4 years.

What's a PC?

[geekmux]

No, I'm not trying to be ignorant in my question. It's rather valid when you consider TFA has pictures of a tablet, a more traditional laptop, and then what appears to be a Surface with a detachable keyboard.

So, I'll ask again, what is considered a "PC" these days? Tablets? Phablets? Touch-screen enabled laptops? Detachable vs. attached keyboards?

And since we now do all the same shit on smarthphones that we do on other computing devices, are smartphones considered Personal Computers? If not, why? (You really can't get any more personal than the computer you carry in your pocket all day)

A shift in form factors is what we're really talking about here, so let's cut through the usual hype/bullshit reporting and understand definitions before labeling it a "decline" in sales.

Utility

[holophrastic]

It's been nearly 35 years since I started using a computer for routine tasks. There simply aren't many new routines to computerize. For that reason, and I'm happy to say for that reason alone, computers will last longer and longer.

Routine one was numbers, think spreadsheets. I managed my elementary-school baseball pool in lotus 1-2-3. Yes, today's spreadsheets are "better", but they don't address any new routines. Once we had charts and graphs, that was it. Don't cry to me about pivot tables that no one uses.

Routine two was writing, think word processing. I put it second to numbers only because numbers needed computers, where writing didn't. But fast writing did. My essays were done in Wordstar for the longest time. By the time fancy fonts came around, we were done. Again, don't cry to me about tables and pictures, that's next.

Routine three was publishing & layout. I used PrintShop -- yeah, I'm calling ten-foot-long birthday banners layout. What of it?

E-mail (desperately trying to remember my first client, really can't, probably compuserve), web browser (duh, ncsa mosaic), music (winamp, still), graphics (jasc paintshop pro), audio (audacity), video (not me), programming (ultraedit since the dawn of our careers).

Add various messengers (ICQ) as the dawn of social media if you will, and newsfeeds (pointcast) as the now-dead origins of podcast directories.

The point is that with the singular exception of "MORE GRAPHICS", be it larger video, more 3d, raytracing, and bigger and bigger games, I think we're finding that there aren't any more parts of life to computerize.

Considering your life five years ago, compared with today, I doubt most people will find any significant routine that is computerizable today, that wasn't five years ago -- leading to the conclusion that a five-year old computer would be just fine.

There was a time when last year's technology was completely useless. Burn a music CD in an hour, but need three to get through failed attempts, or burn a CD in five minutes with ease. Last year's machine couldn't play a single new game, and would never be able to ever again. Can browse the internet, or can't. Could print in colour or black and white only.

We ain't there no more. Windows Vista needed near-brand-new hardware. Windows 10 could run on twenty-year old hardware. The vast majority of businesses today, that existed twenty years ago, don't need anything different than they had twenty years ago. It's hideous, but my local lumber yard uses machines and software from my Wordstar days. They sell wood just the same.

My local hydroponics store still uses carbon paper. I bet you can guess why.

Much Ado About Nothing

[Lodragandraoidh]

I have questions about the data in the report:

1. does this include small systems such as Raspberry PI et al?

2. does this consider people building machines from parts?

Personally, I think people who want or need access to more robust workstation systems for gaming, number crunching, etc, will be able to buy or build the systems they need, for the foreseeable furture because:

1. Business runs on white box systems - including the services behind all of those hand held devices at the other end of the network connection.

2. E-Sports is not just about consoles - and we're talking $billions there.

Your average person who could care less will be fine, and so will those of us who work in the field, play video games, or need to be able to number crunch. Will how people doe these things change? Certainly, but maybe for the better in some ways - particularly for people who may need one of those functions infrequently - they don't have to invest in expensive equipment to leverage cloud based resources through their phone. For the geeks remaining - we'll all be fine.