Even desktops showed up on growth radar in global PC shipment stakes for 2021

The humble PC was one of the hottest selling tech items in 2021 with shipments into the channel jumping 15 per cent globally to 341 million amid a pandemic that continues to force people to work, study, and play at home. The data, collated by Canalys, includes calendar Q4 sales of around 92 million units. The revenue generated …

[Peter2]

Ok, during the pandemic people picked up PC's as you needed them for work and school, and were banned from going out and socialising unless they worked at 10 Downing Street, and laptops were sold out. Perfectly logical.

I'm not convinced though that this means that they have permanent growth when people are allowed to meet up in person again to socialise where they want with no restrictions, and people are back to school and working from an office again. Even if it does totally displace working from the office, that is simply going to eliminate the replacement of all of the PC's that were at the office, so wouldn't it be a net neutral in terms of install base in the long term?

[Hairy Spod]

long, long term maybe, but in the short term as some offices open back up to hybrid working there might even be a period of further growth as a large swathe of currently unused office desktops that are now 2+ years older get upgraded or replaced, not every firm uses laptops.

...also not sure what it was like for everyone else, but as all the cheaper kit got bought up overnight at the start of the pandemic and only more expensive things seemed available for purchase, many staff who were historically lumped with machines previously badged 'Pentium' are now used to the delights of modern i5s and i7s with lots of RAM.

Staff retention might even become more of an issue with the double whammy of A forcing people back into the office and B forcing them to use noticeably slower more sluggish computers,

[Anonymous Coward]

2021: also the year of ..

.. the missing games console.

Has anyone actually seen a PS5 in the wild?

It was expected to be a bestseller, in reality it turned out to be a nonseller on account of there being maybe one container ever made for the whole world..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so yester-year

I didn't even try to replace my laptop in 2021 as a) the desperation for units had gobbled up everything including units with even my inflated specs b) no business travel c) no moving from home desk in the near future, So I bought desktop with 4 times the memory and much better other bits.

Heck yeah, they're going to have to upgrade lots of at-work units to match what people have bought for themselves. They'd best hurry before I upgrade my 10-year-old monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprise! (Not!)

The fanbois and the technology freaks REALLY like those TOUCH devices -- smartphones, tablets.....

But just how many documents, spreadsheets, program listings.....and so on are being built or read on a smartphone?

Has anyone tried filling in a huge data entry spreadsheet on a tablet?

Yup.......TOUCH has its place, but the keyboard and big screen are going to be with us for a while longer!!!!