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Hardware

PC Market Shipments Grow a Stellar 13% in Q3 2020 To Break Ten-Year Record (canalys.com) 38

Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7% from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis. From a report by the research firm: This is the highest growth the market has seen in the past 10 years. After a weak Q1, the recovery in Q2 continued into Q3 this year, and it even grew on top of a strong market the previous year. Global notebook shipments touched 64 million units (almost as much as the record high of Q4 2011 when notebook shipments were 64.6 million) as demand continued to surge due to second waves of COVID-19 in many countries and companies continued to invest in longer-term transitions to remote working. Shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations grew 28.3% year-on-year. This contrasted with desktop and desktop workstations, which saw shipments shrink by 26.0%. Lenovo regained top spot in the PC market in Q3 with growth of 11.4% and shipments surpassed the 19 million mark. HP posted a similarly impressive growth of 11.9% to secure second place with 18.7 million units shipped. Dell, in third, suffered a small decline of 0.5% in shipments from a year ago. Apple and Acer rounded out the top five rankings, posting stellar growth of 13.2% and 15.0% respectively.
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PC Market Shipments Grow a Stellar 13% in Q3 2020 To Break Ten-Year Record

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  • Microsoft pushed an update to Windows 7 providing a literal blue screen telling people to get a new pc with Windows 10.
    • Microsoft pushed an update to Windows 7 providing a literal blue screen telling people to get a new pc with Windows 10.

      Ah, the old choke-on-it upgrade option from Microsoft Blue; synonymous with Viagra, colorfully representing customers getting screwed with the warm glow of a K-Mart special.

  • People had enough of their slow PC with shitty cameras and graded up, since there's no place you can go to waste any money anyway.

    • No cameras for me, I never do video at home, and for team meetings it's only rare and I use the work computer for that. But I did take time to upgrade some stuff. Kept the PC, but got a solid state drive and a new monitor. The drive because I had upgraded to Windows 10 and it had absolutely awful performance compared to Windows 8.1, really terrible. I had wanted a solid state drive for awhile but it was still categorized in my brain as a bit of a luxury item combined with a hassle to migrate to. But Wi

  • It's because in some locales schools are having younger kids do full time distance learning. Sure your five-person family might have two or three PCs, but if your three kids need to all be on at the same time...
    • Maybe but for my kids the public school distributed Chromebooks (they can't require equipment they don't provide due to equal access) and for my daughter in a charter school they also require a Chromebook.

      I never would have thought of buying a Chromebook instead of a PC laptop, but I have to say they are perfectly adequate for garden-variety web usage (including remote learning).

      • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        A lot of schools also use G Suite, so that makes sense. Google has made huge gains in the education market with their services (GSuite, Google Cloud). They are taking the Microsoft/Adobe route of giving schools deep discounts to get students using their products, with the hope that they carry their preferences for their tools over to work when they move into the job market.
      • Maybe but for my kids the public school distributed Chromebooks (they can't require equipment they don't provide due to equal access) and for my daughter in a charter school they also require a Chromebook.

        I never would have thought of buying a Chromebook instead of a PC laptop, but I have to say they are perfectly adequate for garden-variety web usage (including remote learning).

        That's probably what my kid's district should have done, but they bought Windows PCs instead. No real issues yet though.

    • It's because in some locales schools are having younger kids do full time distance learning. Sure your five-person family might have two or three PCs, but if your three kids need to all be on at the same time...

      That and a bunch of folks who are "working from home" and got tired of the equipment they could rustle out of the IT junk closet. The laptop they sent me home with was at least a decade old 13" dell that I had to connect a larger VGA display in order to open more than one window and see anything. That kind of thing gets old pretty quick.

      Also, don't forget the pile of College kids now doing "distance" learning online too. I'm working on a master's degree and they swapped us to online classes only mid spr

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      In part, the biggest part, remote working and a cheap desktop with a big screen to do it. The market will collapse real quick when remote working dies because extroverts can not handle it. So big slump in sales, coming up, not inflated by remote working.

  • by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Monday October 12, 2020 @02:49PM (#60600202)
    "A blessing in disguise" was it?
    • No, as an MBA it isn't.

      There are some businesses that will do well during a down economy, this isn't a sustainable economy to invest in.

      Businesses need customers to prosper. A down economy has a lot of possible customers not willing to buy. Stocks and these businesses that are doing well, are a short term benefit, not necessarily a real trend.

    • "A blessing in disguise" was it?

      Let's hope and pray that COVID will force budget pencils to be sharpened fine enough to eradicate the "need" for micromanagement and the infamous Artful Masters of Bullshitting, represented by the "educated" MBA.

  • ... they will decry the "death" of PCs again ...

    Even more so now that really everyone has a PC that will last them a decade.

    "Market saturation? What's that? Never heard of it!" ;)

    If the markets were a physical process, they would decry every other state of matter than an ongoing explosion as "death".

    • Even more so now that really everyone has a PC that will last them a decade.

      Don't worry. Microsoft will fix that with one of their upcoming "updates".

    • so they'll get about 5 years before the cheaply soldered on power jack gives out.

      I bought my kid a new laptop about every 3-5 years once they hit junior high and needed one (yes, by 7th grade you need one, not much of one but you still need it).

      USB-C might change that though, but I don't think it's available on sub-$800 laptops yet. Maybe if you shop around.
      • by jjmcwill ( 3739 )

        You think they'll last that long?

        The company I work has a new policy that anything beyond the 3 year warranty is automatically up for replacement. Departments are reeling at the new policy change, because it represents a HUGE increase in budgetary expenditures for systems.

        I think it's crazy that they basically throw money away on laptops. Or at least I used to before COVID-19. 8 months ago I would have argued that less than half of the people I saw with laptops in our company really needed the portabilit

        • Do you know what happens to the "old" laptops? I guess they will be given to the manufacturer or some sort of company that manages them. But I wonder what happens to them eventually. I hope they're resold so that someone can use them. It would be an absolute waste to just recycle them or dispose them.
  • So I ended up giving Dell a try and easily it was the worst trackpad I've ever used on their current generation of XPS laptops. These are supposed to be the top of the line models but the experience was anything but. Loose, wobbly inconsistent click. I opened up the laptop to see what was going on and it was shocking how cheap the trackpad's design is. No frame, no rubber gasket, no mechanism, nothing! It's literally the trackpad surface fastened to the top frame near the keyboard. That's it! The clicking m
    • Good for you. High end Dell laptops have been sliding into the garbage rather quickly of late. Although, I'm not at all sure what is out there that's not suffering from quality problems these days. Laptops are high in non-recurring engineering costs compared to desk tops and you can only make money selling them by doing large volumes. As no company is going to be buying high end stuff for their employees when a cheaper model will do, I'm guessing Dell doesn't sell a lot of the high end laptops, except to

    • All trackpads suck.

  • Since mice are not going away, let's create a decent state-ful GUI markup standard so that we don't have to live with HTML/DOM's limitations and bloated JavaScript libraries to make apps with real UI's for real work.

    • And let's make keyboards work properly on Android. (Hey. You smart people over there. Prove it.)

      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        It's proven hard to optimize for both mobile and mouse & keyboard at the same time. Either you favor one, or do both poorly as a compromise. Maybe someday they'll all get it right, but as it is now, it's best to design "productivity" business software for primarily mouse and keyboard, but mobile has watered down our standards.

        • Hard. But not very hard... harder than making a tuna sandwich, easier than making a souffle. Really hard to get it done if you don't give a shit.

  • by iampiti ( 1059688 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @03:29AM (#60601978)
    This is likely just because of the pandemic. It may keep going on for a while if some more office jobs transition to mostly remote but it'll eventually return to pre-covid levels (or less).
  • So, PCs cost more and take longer? :(

  • Phones are the communication device. Tablets are fine for consuming entertainment and reading. Maybe sell some chromebooks to the education market. People still do their work on laptops and desktops. More people working from home meant more laptop sales perhaps?
  • Fcuk Lenovo! - Posted on corporate Lenovo laptop.

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