The plight of the PC market over the last several years is nothing new and it’s safe to say that it’s been well documented. For the most part, all the signs have indicated doom and gloom. However, one analyst feels that the market could turn the corner next year.
In fact, Ben Bajarin, who is the Director of Consumer Technology at Creative Strategies, a market intelligence and research outfit, says that there are “glimmers of hope” for the PC market next year.
Here’s what Bajarin had to say about what he expects of the PC market in 2014.
“It appears the PC market is stabilizing in the U.S., meaning that quarterly negative growth is lessening. What [the data] also shows is that tablet growth is also slowing in the U.S.”
Research firm IDC has stated that it expects tablet growth to slow down from 53.5 percent this year, to 22.2 percent next year. In 2015, IDC expects that growth to sink down to single digit territory. On top of that, IDC also predicted a -10 percent downturn in PC shipments at the end of this year, while also saying that the decline would slow to -4 percent next year. In the meantime, analysts expected that 2012 would be the year that people would upgrade their PCs, but that didn’t occur, and it didn’t happen this year either.
The hope is that people do exchange their current PCs for new ones at some point next year. The reason why many refuse to upgrade their PCs is likely due to the fact that they’re still satisfactory for common, simple tasks like email, web surfing, watching videos and more. These are tasks that are near universal in the computing experience.
“There are an estimated 180 million to 200 million four- and five-year-old PCs in use,” Bajarin said. “We’ve seen a major increase in battery life for notebooks [this year], so if people are going to actually upgrade those PCs, it’s got to happen next year. It should be a pretty big refresh cycle.”
In the end, time will tell. What do you think next year and the future in general hold for the PC market? Sound off in the comments below.