PC Shipments Up 26.1%, Obviously The PC Is Still Dead

91.6 Million Computers Shipped Q4

Sure, it is hard to locate enthusiast parts at the moment, but that has not slowed the sales of laptops, desktops or workstations this year. For the first time in a decade PC sales saw a sharp increase globally and not just by a couple of percentage points.   Staying at home seems to have led to a wave of upgrading, with older laptops and desktops being bought up in record numbers, fuelled by those shifting to working from home as well as the large increase in gaming over this past year.

Interestingly the market shares of the top companies did not really shift, as everyone saw roughly the same increase in sales.  Lenovo owns 24% , HP 22.4%, , Dell hit 16.6%, Apple accounted for 7.6% and Acer came close to matching them at 6.9%.  The sales were not simply the traditional low end white box productivity machines, as higher end gaming machines made up a fair chunk of the sales as well as Chromebooks.

IDC expects this trend to continue this year, not just from enthusiasts picking up entire systems to be able to get their hands on the new GPUs and CPUs which are so hard to purchase on their own but also households dealing with working and learning from home.  Ars Technica has links to the study and a bit of the recent history of PC sales here if you would like to know more.