Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Report: PC shipments to dip 5% in 2015, prices expected to rise, tablet growth has slowed

By

report pc shipments to dip 5 in 2015 prices expected rise tablet growth has slowed windows
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The state of PC shipments is more downbeat than originally expected, but there are positive long-term signs, according to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC). Two notable tidbits in the report are that tablet purchases have slowed and that average prices of PCs in the near term will rise.

Worldwide PC (desktop and portable) shipments will decline by 4.9 percent in 2015, according to the market intelligence firm. This reflects a more pessimistic outlook than IDC’s original forecast of a 3.3 percent decline.

Recommended Videos

A total of 293.1 million PCs are expected to ship in 2015 – 125.5 million desktop PCs and 167.5 million portable PCs. In 2019, total worldwide PC shipments are expected to drop to 291.4 million. While worldwide desktop PC shipments are expected to decline from now until 2019, portable PC shipments are expected to rise 1.7 percent to 170.4 million. This is driven by emerging markets, where portable PC shipments are expected to grow 5.8 percent from now until 2019.

IDC PC shipments 2015-2019
Image used with permission by copyright holder

In terms of sales, the worldwide PC market hit $201 billion in 2014. This figure is expected to drop 6.9 percent this year, and by 2019 the PC market will shrink to $175 billion, according to IDC.

The report notes that PC demand was inflated in Q4 2014, thanks to inventory buildup of “Windows 8.1 + Bing” systems ahead of the pullback of Microsoft subsidies in early 2015. This elimination of Bing subsidies along with the strong U.S. dollar and the shift toward slim, convertible and touch-based systems will push up average prices in the near term, according to IDC.

“Fortunately for PC makers, tablet growth has slowed,” said Jay Chou, senior research analyst for worldwide PC trackers at IDC. “The PC ecosystem has also begun to see some fruits from efforts to narrow the divide between the PC and mobile devices in terms of both user experience and price points. Nevertheless, much more needs to be done as advances in both hardware and software are expected to benefit an ever wider spectrum of form factors, such as 2-in-1 devices that will further siphon volume from notebooks.”

IDC also expects Windows 10 to have a positive reception, which will improve the experience for users of traditional mouse-and-keyboard PC systems. This will help slow the shift toward touch-based devices, according to the firm.

This outlook is more melancholy than Gartner’s forecast last summer, which declared that 2015 would be a bounce-back year for PC shipments. Strategy Analytics had a rosy outlook for global PC sales in 2015, forecasting a 5 percent increase last fall.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Jason Hahn
Jason Hahn
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…
The best all-in-one printers you can buy in 2024
Canon's imageClass MF753Cdw has a quick, full-duplex ADF.

If you're shopping for the best printers for a home office, an all-in-one is a good choice. Multifunction printers include scanners to digitize receipts, invoices, and other documents. The scan and print functions combine to make copies. Some all-in-one printers can connect to a phone line to act like a fax machine.

Multifunction printers are like the smaller cousins of the bulkier copiers you might see at the office. As our printer buyers' guide points out, an all-in-one printer usually costs less than it would to buy a printer and scanner separately. Here are some of the best multifunction printers on the market today.

Read more
Asus pits AMD’s performance against Intel’s efficiency
Asus ProArt PX13 front view showing display and keyboard.

Several new laptops chipsets have been introduced lately in response to Microsoft's Copilot+ PC AI initiative. They sport faster neural processing units (NPUs) to speed up on-device AI processing and make it more efficient, but they're not precisely the same. AMD's Ryzen AI 9 chipsets are aimed at overall performance, while Intel's Lunar Lake is aimed at efficiency.

The Asus ProArt PX13 is one of the first with AMD's chipset, and it's a highly portable 13-inch laptop. The Asus Zenbook S 14 is aimed at great battery life in a thin-and-light design using Lunar Lake. Both are some of the best laptops you can buy today, but which laptop is the better choice?
Specs and configurations

Read more
Nvidia might finally fix its VRAM problem — but it will take time
The Razer Blade 14 and 18 on a table.

It's no secret that some of Nvidia's best graphics cards could use a little more VRAM. According to a new leak, Nvidia may be addressing that problem in a big way -- at least in laptops. The RTX 5090 laptop GPU is now reported to come with 24GB VRAM across a 256-bit memory bus. The downside? These new laptops might not make it to market as soon as we'd hoped.

The information comes from Moore's Law Is Dead, who cites his own industry sources as he spills the beans on RTX 50-series laptop specs. Up until now, we've not heard much about Nvidia's plans for RTX 50 laptops, indicating that they might be a few months away. The YouTuber agrees with this, saying that Nvidia might be targeting a launch window in the first or second quarter of 2025. This might not affect the entire lineup, though.

Read more