Everybody chill, PC sales are not imploding
PC SALES NOSEDIVED by about 30 percent in the first quarter of this year. But that is no reason to panic—pretty much all digital devices have taken a hit of late. Besides, if you bother to give the numbers more than a cursory glance, you’ll see that PC sales are remarkably strong.
To get more specific, two leading research outfits have released numbers for PC sales covering the first quarter of 2023, and it’s not pretty. Canalys reckons PC shipments tanked by 32.6 percent compared to the same period in 2022, while IDC puts it at 29 percent. Cue tales of woe across online media and the broader commentariat.
IDC notes that PC sales now are worse than before the pandemic, implying that the fall is more than a mere readjustment following an uptick in sales during that stay-at-home period. But that isn’t actually right. Instead, even taking the recent drop into account, PC sales are still up overall.
For several years prior to the pandemic, PC sales ran at about 60 million units in the first quarter of every year, and then roughly 65 to 75 million for each of the remaining three quarters. But during the bizarre pandemic boom, shipments ran at 80 million units plus for seven consecutive quarters, two of which were up around 90 million.
The fact that PC shipments fell back to the mid-to-high 50 million mark in the first quarter of this year, depending on whether you use Canalys or IDC’s figures, does not mean PC sales have tanked. On the contrary, overall PC sales are still massively up over the last couple of years.
Canalys suggests that interest rates are to blame for flagging PC shipments, noting that shipment volumes have fallen for four consecutive quarters. But isn’t the point that people don’t need to repeatedly buy brand new PCs in short order?
A whole bunch of PCs got bought from late 2020 through early 2022— far more than usual—and those PCs do not already need replacing. Those purchases almost certainly brought forward upgrades that would have happened a little later on. The net result is that demand is now flagging a little.
If anything, the real story is how little that demand has dipped. You might think that if something like an extra 100 million extra PCs were bought during the pandemic then volumes would dip by a similar amount once life went back to normal, but we’ve actually seen only a small dip. Even more remarkably, analysts are predicting an upturn in shipments in the second half of this year. If that happens, the net impact of the pandemic years will unambiguously be more PC sales.
None of this leaves the analyst industry looking too clever. All you have to do is briefly scan their graphs with the knowledge of that stay-athome inspired spike in demand to understand what has been going on. To talk about four quarters of declining growth without accounting for that context is to miss the point.
It’s a classic case of not being able to see the wood for the trees. That and the temptation for these companies to favor the most superficially technical and jargon-infused narratives, the better to look clever and justify pricey access to the longer versions of their market research.
Observing that everyone went a little crazy buying stuff during the pandemic and that’s catching up with the market a little doesn’t fill the pages of a premiumaccess report as effectively as reams of interest rate analysis and millimetric plotting of growth curves, as if profound insights lie therein. We’ve all got to earn a dollar, I guess.
If anything, the real story is how little that demand has dipped
Six raw 4K panels for breakfast, laced with extract of x86... Jeremy Laird eats and breathes PC technology.