That's according to analyst firm IDC, as reported by The Reg:
Desktop PC shipments dipped below 100 million in 2017 and there's
worse to come across the personal computing device market according to
analyst firm IDC.
The company on Wednesday published a summary
of its Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker for 2017's
final quarter in which it totted up shipments for the year across all
forms of PC and slate-style tablets.
The headline figure was a 2.7 per cent year-over-year decline.
The firm said "commercial PC renewal momentum remained as the main catalyst in a market that was also tempered by lackluster demand for legacy form factor devices and component shortages." There was a little good news in 2017 with growth in notebook sales, as they grew more strongly than in any year since 2012, but the overall picture was poor.
Their article includes a handy table showing the expected decline for each product category, but even with notebooks and detachable tablets expected to grow modestly, overall PC sales are expected to drop 1.80% in the next five years. And that's not the only bad news:
News of continuing slow-downs in PC and tablet sales come on top of the first-ever drop in smartphone sales.
People just don't see value in upgrades these days, and who can blame them? Devices are now almost devoid of moving parts that break and have been water-and-dust-proofed to keep their innards clean. CPU upgrades offer less obvious advantages for common workloads or tasks.
Worldwide smartphone shipments dropped by 5.6%, which is their first-ever drop, according to different analyst group Gartner:
Several major factors caused the market shrinkage, said Anshul Gupta,
research director at Gartner. “First, upgrades from feature phones to
smartphones have slowed right down due to a lack of quality
‘ultra-low-cost’ smartphones and users preferring to buy quality feature
phones.
“Second, replacement smartphone users are choosing quality models and keeping them longer, lengthening the replacement cycle of smartphones. Moreover, while demand for high quality, 4G connectivity and better camera features remained strong, high expectations and few incremental benefits during replacement weakened smartphone sales,” Gupta added.
That's what the end of Moore's Law looks like, folks. With sales of both PCs
and smartphones now declining because new devices just aren't that much better than the old ones, and VR sales still stubbornly not increasing to take up the slack, makers of consumer electronics could be looking at some lean years over the next five.