PC market has seen its first growth quarter in six years

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/12/gartner-global-pc-shipments-grew-1-4-in-q2-2018-first-increase-in-6-years/

by tronotonante • 8 years ago

133 86 8 years ago

venturebeat.com

gallerdude• 8 years ago

I can’t think of any major, consumer-friendly reason? Right now, the PC market feels a bit stagnant.

IloveHN84• 8 years ago

Games

johnchristopher• 8 years ago

Steam and online distribution way easier than in the 90's and 20's ?

babaganoosh89• 8 years ago

Maybe it’s because of intel’s shift of 2 -> 4 cores, and 4 -> 6 cores for their consumer line of cpus. It’s relatively a bigger performance jump than in the past.

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

I think it's fair to say AMD meditation is the root

mtgx2• 8 years ago

That increase in cores doesn't come without an increase in price, so I don't think this reason is as important as you think it is.

cat199• 8 years ago

i'd guess that aggregate growth has outpaced other 'stagnating' factors which led to state of non-growth, aka the growth curves have adjusted for laptops, tablets, and smart phones

terminalcommand• 8 years ago

I think the interest in PCs grew, especially amongst the younger generation. With the new budget CPUs offering real good performance (a 8th gen i3 can offer approximately the same performance as a 7th gen i5), you can get much higher performance for your money than laptops. The price gap is much more evident when it comes to gaming.

Among my friends in their 20s, most of them want to build a PC. It could be the case that my generation didn't experience the growth and the decline of the PC market and we don't appreciate the value of laptops yet. The hype for building a custom PC certainly exists.

But from a consumer's standpoint, I also think laptops win in most cases.

Correction: Thanks to the reply, I noticed that "PC Market" statistics included both Laptops and Desktop PCs. I am leaving this post as is, as it represents my ideas on why there is still a -possibly growing?- interest for desktop PCs.

lovelearning• 8 years ago

"PC shipment" seems to include desktops and laptops.

Gartner describes the data[1] as "Data includes desk-based PCs, notebook PCs and ultramobile premiums (such as Microsoft Surface), but not Chromebooks or iPads."

[1] https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3881812

mtgx2• 8 years ago

a 8th gen i3 can offer approximately the same performance as a 7th gen i5

But is a 8th gen i3 significantly lower price than the 7th gen i5 when it came out? Because using your logic, that would be what would matter here.

If it's not, then it may be due to the availability of Ryzen CPUs, too, which are cheaper for more cores.

scarface74• 8 years ago

The growth in the PC market had nothing to do with the consumer market.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/pc-market-appears-to...

Gartner reports that the growth was driven by increased business sales and that consumer shipments declined. IDC similarly pointed to the "business-driven refresh cycle" as a reason for the increase. This mirrors Microsoft's financial reporting; the software giant distinguishes between business and consumer sales of Windows and Office, and the general pattern over the last few quarters is that business sales have been robust even as consumer demand continues to soften. Enterprises are migrating to Windows 10, and they're buying new hardware to do so.

noir_lord2• 8 years ago

I went the other way, I was a PC gamer and 'only true programming PC consumes 700W and acts as a space heater' type for nearly two decades and then somewhere along the line laptops got fast.

My T470P with an i7-7700HQ/32GB RAM/nvme m.2 handles all the programming I realistically need to do (I realised this when I had W10 running in a VM (8Gb/2 CPU), 3 vagrant instances and intellij open and still had 12GB of RAM free.

When I bought the laptop the plan was to build a Ryzen desktop pretty much immediately afterwards but here I am a year later deferring that till next year and the Zen2 architecture and my incentive to build a desktop has gone out the window, the Thinkpad runs a 27" 4K display just fine and for programming thats all I need it to do when I don't feel like working on the sofa.

So yes I can see ML and Gaming been a driver but since I don't do the former and rarely have the time for the latter I'm in the strange position of having a laptop be my primary computer for the first time since I started using PC's in 1987.

Hell the only game I play anymore on PC is Chess everything else the Xbox One is just fine.

codingdave• 8 years ago

From the source article linked in the first paragraph: "PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment”

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

also six years since I've seen osnews linked on any frontpage (happy the site is still alive)

juusto• 8 years ago

I still follow it almost daily, "grew" up on it and if it would disappear I would feel sad for it.

ianlevesque• 8 years ago

Maybe corporate PCs finally needed a refresh.

foepys3• 8 years ago

This is most likely it. Businesses are switching from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and are buying new hardware for it.

bluedino• 8 years ago

That’s what I’ve seen. Between adding an SSD and upgrading to Win 10 it just make sense to get a new machine with a new warranty

arenaninja2• 8 years ago

Maybe. Our company is doing a large refresh, but we no longer get physical PCs, it's all thin clients to a virtualized environment

I'm unsure whether those units are counted as part of the PC market

throwbacktictac• 8 years ago

What sort of workloads does your company run? Are they MS Windows or *nix thin clients?

candiodari• 8 years ago

And we all remember those from the 1980s. Those things were so bad that we switched to windows in the first place.

21• 8 years ago

What exactly do you mean by a thin client?

With $300 you can get a retina display laptop with Celeron quad-core and 6 GB RAM.

adventured• 8 years ago

Immediate business expensing courtesy of the US tax changes.

HP + Dell added 1.7 million units vs the prior year. A substantial boost for them.

From April:

"Tax Windfall Going to Capex Way Faster Than Stock Buybacks"

"Among the 130 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results in this earnings season, capital spending increased by 39 percent, the fastest rate in seven years, data compiled by UBS AG show."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/trump-tax...

nobrains• 8 years ago

Potential reason: Fortnite?

zamadatix• 8 years ago

Following the source chain back to Gartner their conclusion on the data was:

"PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment. In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC. In the business segment, PC momentum will weaken in two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes. PC vendors should look for ways to maintain growth in the business market as the Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off."

untog• 8 years ago

I doubt too many business PCs are being upgraded to run Fortnite.

aioprisan• 8 years ago

FTA it's due to business PC growth, not casual PC growth

Joeri2• 8 years ago

If that’s true basically the PC market for business has hit bottom. There’s very little traction for non-PC form factors as daily drivers in business, so there is a minimum market size just to keep every employee equipped with a laptop, and this seems to be it.

The consumer market can still drop further though. Most people are fine using ipads, and probably even better off than with a laptop when all things are considered.

TangoTrotFox• 8 years ago

I think you're conflating things. A decline in sales does not mean a decline in usage. Arguably the biggest reason that PC sales have declined is because a PC from 5+ years ago is now still 100% solid for everything outside of high end gaming and some esoteric tasks. And even in the case where somebody does want to engage in e.g. high end gaming, swapping out a video card is fine - and that's something that's not reflected in these reports which only count buying new preassembled machines from first party manufacturers.

PC sales were at their peak when machines were outdated in 6 months and obsolete in 2 years. That era is completely dead. At this point there are likely literally billions of reasonably high performance machines out in the world. And I think also more people than ever have realized that 'building your own computer' is about as difficult as putting together a 10 piece lego toy, and you get exactly what you want, and you likely save a reasonable amount of money.

Spooky232• 8 years ago

No... the Intel conveyor belt of improvement has been stagnant for 5 years. You actually have to be careful to not buy slower computers when you refresh these days.

Now Windows 10 is driving an upgrade cycle by arbitrarily dropping support for old stuff and shipping every 6 months. Microsoft will continue to squeeze until people leave the platform.

sdenton4• 8 years ago

"Most people are fine using iPads..."

Tablet sales have yanked though, and touch keyboards suck for writing anything longer than, say, this comment. (Actually, even this given the incidence of typos... Count them!)

If your job involves wound emails, you probably need a laptop.

raverbashing• 8 years ago

I wonder if this is due to a refresh cycle from PS bought in the past 3-5 years

It's 1.4% growth of something that was going downhill for a while already, so it might not be too impactful

lozf• 8 years ago

Gotta get these last vulnerable processors (Spectre, Meltdown) deployed in businesses for a good few years, before the next gen fixes come out.

Zealotux• 8 years ago

What was the mining market's impact on PC market? Surely it must've had some consequence on figures.

foepys3• 8 years ago

None. These stats only include completely assembled and ready-to-use PCs from Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc. Individual components like GPUs are not included.

jjeaff• 8 years ago

I wouldn't say none. The massive increase in GPU prices did spur some to buy prebuilt where otherwise, they would have built a custom machine. Many large companies that sell higher end machines didn't jack up their prices nearly as much as the graphics cards alone.

Also, some miners were buying prebuilt systems to harvest the GPU, then out a cheaper GPU in it and sell it.

kowdermeister• 8 years ago

I guess the boom of all other forms of computing, smartphones, tablets, laptops...

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bi...

foepys3• 8 years ago

This is blog spam. It only links to this article: https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/12/gartner-global-pc-shipmen...

ordu• 8 years ago

Moreover NoScript warns about potential XSS-attack on that blog post.

nailer• 8 years ago

Original source: https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3881812

Includes both laptops and desktops

woranl• 8 years ago

I wonder how much of this is related to the new MacBook keyboard.

cutler• 8 years ago

Or Macbook/iMac prices. My desktop has been a Hackintosh for the last 7 years. When my 5-year-old Macbook Pro dies I'll be looking for a Hackintoshable PC laptop.

Moto7451• 8 years ago

Really I'm responding to you and the GP, but based on the article:

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.

Apple is part of the market increase.

MacRumors highlighted Apple's numbers from the same report. They grew 3% YoY: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/12/mac-shipments-up-in-q2-...

ksec• 8 years ago

Interesting lot of people thought it was business cycles. Which is only partly true. There is China and PC Gaming. Both are now a huge market. For the past 4 - 5 years, if it wasn't for PC gaming, Unit Shipment would have been falling 10%+ YoY.

Many years ago people thought console would take over gaming. And it turns out Keyboard and Mouse are irreplaceable for certain type of games. You may never play PSE or FIFA on your PC any more, but many more strategy games, Online Games, FPS are still on PC. And as generation of people who grew up in gaming, there is ever increasing number of people on Twitch or other E-Sport streaming site.

Unfortunately Apple thinks Gaming is a waste of time. And therefore Mac doesn't really cater for Games Developers. iOS Gaming is still a result of iOS popularity rather then Apple making it better. We can used to argue PC gaming is niche, for nerds, Riva TNT, 3Dfx, Rage 128, Radeon, Geforce.....

Now PC Gaming is no longer a small communities, and will continue to grow into much larger in the years to come.

yuhong• 8 years ago

I wonder if some of it is about the fact that the PC demand due to GPU shortages may be only short term. In any case, the demand was definitely very sudden and there is no way that Apple would have been prepared for it.

stock_toaster• 8 years ago

Perhaps due to the slowdowns induced by the meltdown/specter mitigations.

“It wasnt a bug! It was economic stimulus!” /s

hrktb2• 8 years ago

FPS are slowly moving to consoles though, and I think most popular genres will have the same trajectory.

Once there’s enough money to be made, publishers will tackle any issue there is to move a genre to the bigger audience.

That doesn’t mean for me that PC gaming will fade away, just that it will stay a limited market where makers will experiment more freely than on the other marketplaces.

User23• 8 years ago

Console FPS and PC FPS practically play like different genres that happen to have very similar visuals. I doubt either will replace the other.

onli• 8 years ago

Which bigger audience? Hard to dig up exact numbers, but at least in terms of revenue it was 28% vs 29% of the gaming market in 2017, see https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-game-sales-numbers-market-share-.... PC gaming is huge, and statements projecting a move to consoles of genres or the market have been around for several decades now, and they never came true.

throwaway333444• 8 years ago

Your comment about iOS gaming implies that it is an inferior platform relative to Android in terms of gaming. In reality despite Apples myopic attitude towards desktop gaming their mobile gaming platform is better than androids by a significant margin.

Consider the following: 1) Per user revenue in iOS out paces per user revenue in Android by so much that many titles make more on iOS than they do on Android despite Android having ~70% of the market

2) Apples hardware & os provide superior performance relative to even premium Android phones despite Apples compulsion towards thinner. (This is largely due to vulkans infancy compared to the relative maturity of metal)

3) fragmentation

4) walled garden is actually a plus for developers who worry about apk sharing

5) Apples store does business in China making Apple a one stop shop for the world whereas android requires at least one separate partner just for China.

Note: Please pardon any grammar, spelling, & formatting errors due to this response originating from a mobile device

nkkollaw• 8 years ago

If games are keyboard-based, I don't think Apple would be a good platform, given the state of their keyboards.

mey• 8 years ago

I wonder where the high demands of VR are driving the change. If I wanted to do VR I would finally have to upgrade my 5year old PC desktop that had been great. Aftermarket SSD and GPU greatly expand it's life.

rolleiflex• 8 years ago

I suspect that might have something to do with it coming back to the ‘cool kids’ corner’. I’m a designer, and a) being interested in ML / AI enough to the point that I needed neural nets running, b) and VR kits not struggling so I can keep an eye on that emerging market were the first two things in more than a decade that made my hardware feel just not up to snuff. The last of such ‘I need real hardware’ feeling was the jump to Core 2 Duo that made every developer seemingly assume overnight that they had access to multiple processors.

I haven’t even owned a Windows-based PC in 10 years and I’m on the market for a liquid cooled GTX 1080Ti and AMD Threadripper — guess what is old is new again. Fun times!

asdsa5325• 8 years ago

I doubt it. I'm a young guy with lots of gamer friends, and none of us are remotely interested in VR. It's clunky and unintuitive at the moment.

Business orders are likely driving the growth.

dominostars• 8 years ago

I'm less skeptical than the other responders. VRChat in particular has been quite a viral sensation with a few popular memes, and a lot of twitch.tv activity.

VR is what got me to build my own PC after a decade of exclusive mac use.

api• 8 years ago

Is it in the developing world? Mobile is very limited due to small devices and more importantly crippled by design OSes. I've thought for a while that mobile's adoption in the developing world would be a gateway drug for computing and that PC adoption would follow after wages rise and/or PC prices drop.

xfer• 8 years ago

Most people in developing world use mobile devices purely for communication and music/videos, i don't think that these uses will drive rise of PC usage.

Theodores• 8 years ago

New PCs are needed when new employees come along.

There is an extraordinary amount of full employment at the moment in 'b*s4it jobs', those pointless jobs that don't really matter but somehow exist. Small to medium sized businesses just bloat out with these positions over time and only a harsh recession means that these jobs get systematically culled. With these jobs you need yet another PC. You can't buy fancy laptops as there is status value in those things and a PC is as glorified as a phone on the desk of someone doing one of these make-believe-jobs of inane pointlessness. Demand for stationary cupboard supplies is probably also up 1.4% with BIC taking a few sales from PaperMate in an otherwise flat market.

This is the sort of headline you get when the housing market needs a 'boost'. Anecdotally you may know that nobody has been able to buy/sell for ages and that prices are not going up, however, some survey that is independent but paid for buy a building society/bank comes out to give the impression that the market is moving again.

The Update in the story cites another report where the numbers for HP and Lenovo are different, so the headline 1.4% is margin of error, not a genuine sign of a market on the move.

FollowSteph3• 8 years ago

I think it’s a blip caused by people upgrading their cpu due to spectre and meltdown. Not always because their cpu may be exposed but also as an excuse.

PC market has seen its first growth quarter in six years

Related Stories