PC Market Notches First Year Of Growth In Years

As Microsoft concludes its support for Windows 7 and companies need to upgrade their legacy devices, the PC market has reportedly had its first year of growth since 2011. Windows 10 was installed on 900 million devices as of September 2019, The Verge reported.

IDC believes that worldwide PC shipments increased by 2.7 percent to 266.7 million devices around the world. Gartner, on the other hand, has it marked at 0.6 percent to 261.2 million devices.

Both firms have widely agreed on the direction of the PC market, but they differ a bit in their count of devices. While both companies include notebooks, desktops and detachable tablets such as the Surface, Gartner does not include Chromebooks. Gartner and IDC, however, make note of Windows 10 upgrades for the turnaround.

The PC market wasn’t all good news last year. Gartner pointed out that the Intel CPU shortage was a “major issue,” while IDC noted that the situation was aided by the adoption of CPUs from AMD. IDC, however, noted that the benefits from needing to upgrade to a new operating system aren’t likely to last long.

There are new technologies coming in the future, such as dual- and folding-screen devices as well as 5G, but they will take time to come to fruition. According to The Wall Street Journal, Dell Technologies Inc., HP Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. still dominated the industry, controlling roughly two-thirds between them as of Q4, per one count.

Spending on technology was projected to reach $1.69 trillion last year, which was 5.3 percent higher than the year before, per news in October.

IDC released its semiannual Worldwide Connected Consumer Spending Guide, which reportedly indicated that technology spending will remain strong through 2023, arriving at $2.06 trillion with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.1 percent. Most of the spending – approximately three-quarters of it – would be on traditional technologies and mobile phone services, specifically data and voice, noted the report.