PC sales take double-digit tumble in Q2 amid economic downturn A combination of factors including lockdowns, geopolitical tensions and falling discretionary household spending trashed PC demand in calendar Q2, forcing the market to shrink by double digits. According to preliminary estimates by the number crunchers at IDC, 71.3 million computers were sold into channels during the three …
Well I guess that's a good thing, but it's no surprise that PC are on the decline. I've said it before and I'll say it again, COVID made a lot of people buy computers, they won't be needing another one before a decade.
If you really think 2022 will reproduce the figures of 2020, buckle up, you've got a long wait ahead.
I'm glad you are saying "decline" instead of death, because the post end of year Q1-2 slump has been a regular thing since, oh the 90's right?
People keep wailing that the market is dying when it's just down and following an established set of cycles. Yes, there was a pandemic glut, but most of those machines are going to be on a 3-4 year lifecycle, not a 10 year cycle. And new hardware purchases are also driven by having a perceivable benefit from the new hardware. Intel and Microsoft's technical stagnation had as much to do with the prior "winter" as other market forces. Now that AMD is firing on all cylinders and NVIDIA is pushing new GPU generations, even the intransigence of the old guard won't choke the technical progress of the next couple years. And the server market will continue to be healthy as companies have to iterate the new infrastructure they built in the pandemic.
So as the machines bought in the covid glut go off warranty, the combination of the market downturn, rising chip supply, and technical improvements will make for a buyers market. It may not read as ongoing double digit profits for the PC/server industry, but that isn't a dying industry, just one that by necessity is slowing down off of a boom. So yeah, just don't expect to sell off all your stock and retire in the next couple of years.
"Now that AMD is firing on all cylinders and NVIDIA is pushing new GPU generations, even the intransigence of the old guard won't choke the technical progress of the next couple years."
Yes, they are making advances, and people will certainly be buying things to take advantage of them, but the hardware advances won't get the quantity that investors have come to want. The average office or home computer doesn't need the latest and fastest CPU. Even though AMD's new ones are significantly advanced and I'm also seeing promising things with Intel's adoption of mixed cores*, a lot of tasks will continue to run fine on old hardware. Microsoft's obsolescence plan with Windows 11 might start changing that in 2025 when Windows 10 starts putting up scary warnings, but given the number of people still using XP in 2015 or 7 today, probably not as much as expected.
* I know it's fashionable to hate Intel and say that its chips are clearly bad, but many of their chips, especially those for laptops or low-end desktops, have seen massive increases in benchmark results simply because they've started adding more efficiency cores. That doesn't work for everyone, as if you need a lot of sustained compute you're still better off with a lot of very fast cores, but for average users whose tasks are less reliant on grinding operations, it shows promise.
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