Gartner: Not a very merry Christmas for PC market as chip shortage bites, small biz vanishes

Global PC shipments slumped 4.3 per cent in the final quarter of the year as computer manufacturers had a very unhappy festive season. According to Gartner numbers published today, vendors suffered a year-long decline of 1.3 per cent in shipments to 259.4 million units, and in the final quarter, shipments of 68.6 million units …

[RyokuMas]

Aaaaannd go!

Cue the USUAL SUSPECT making some kind of comment about how this is all "Win-10-nic"'s fault...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...

“Chip supply shortages” or delayed orders from savvy buyers wanting Spectre / Meltdown immune chips?

[EmilPer.]

they came, they saw ...

the customers came, they saw the fugly cases, the blinding RGB bling, the old Intel cpus named so nobody understands what is what, and they bought an SSD and maybe some more RAM and they left

maybe next year

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: they came, they saw ...

And the consumers walked away because the manufacturers aren't selling what is wanted.

I was going to buy a pair of new laptops just before Christmas, and bought second hand instead, because the current crop of small (13 inch screen) laptops that my wife and kids want are either ridiculously expensive or come crippled by a soldered on SSD (with a tiny capacity) and have insufficient RAM for the way my family use them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: they came, they saw ...

Very much agree. A small and powerful laptop seems impossible unless you go to the super-expensive end of the market (XPS13 etc). If you want a lot of RAM you have to also buy a big screen and a big keyboard with a numberpad so your hands spend most of the time offset from the centre of the laptop which is really annoying if you actually use your laptop on your lap. And the thing weighs a ton.