The Great PC Renaissance of 2020 (Premium)

A Reuters report claims that component makers won’t be able to fulfill the unexpected pandemic-based demand for PCs until 2022. That’s good news for PC makers and fans of the platform. Assuming that it’s true.

As many readers know, I’ve been tracking quarterly and annual PC sales for many years, and I average the sales estimates provided by Gartner and IDC because these are the two most well-respected analyst firms that cover this market. But this averaged data is, at best, a rough estimate since both companies have their own methodologies and include (or don’t include) certain device types, like Chromebooks.

And there are, of course, other firms providing their own data, like Canalys, that I don’t know as well and thus don’t trust as much, and don’t typically report their findings. But whatever: Canalys estimates will often differ from those from Gartner, which will, in turn, differ from those from IDC, and from other firms. Whichever data you choose to use and trust, there will be differences.

The point of all that is that the Reuters report is interesting from a broad strokes perspective, but like all predictions and analyses, there’s no hard truth, just a hope that there are some reasonably true generalizations. What the data I use shows is that the PC has been in decline since its apex in 2011, when roughly 365 million PCs were sold. But the rate of decline has slowed in recent years, and we even saw a barely measurable uptick in 2019. I long referred to this long-anticipated milestone as a plateauing, meaning we would one day reach a “new normal” in PC sales, and that future declines would be small.

What that means in hard numbers---which again, are just estimates of my own creation based on data from Gartner and IDC---is that the PC market had settled in at about 264 million units sold in 2019. That’s over 100 million units that the PC market experiences in 2011, meaning that the market had shrunk by about 28 percent in roughly a decade. It’s almost one-third smaller than it was in 2011.

And then the pandemic happened.

For all the awfulness that was 2020---and to be clear, this year was nothing less than a shitshow---one of several silver linings was the renewed sense on the part of many individuals that the PC isn’t just important, it’s vital. This reawakening was, to me, as refreshing as Microsoft’s plans to refocus on traditional PC form factors in Windows 10 (while continuing to invest at lower levels in things like tablets and smartpens, and in new form factors too).

I assume it’s obvious to everyone, however, that the pandemic’s effect on the perceived relevancy of the PC is, while not temporary, not a cure-all. The PC isn’t going to start selling better and better each year and reach and then surpass its 2011 apex. That said, there’s no reason that the pandemic can’t help reset that plateau, that new normal, to a slightly higher level. Maybe a unit sales figure so...

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