2015 saw massive decline in PC shipments

IDC says PC sales are expected to be down 10 percent this year, with the tough times continuing in 2016

The PC business can’t climb out of the four-year hole it’s dug for itself, according to researcher IDC. Shipments of new personal computers dropped 10 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, which means shipments declined 10.3 percent from 2014. The firm now expects all OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to ship 276.7 million PCs this year, compared to 308.2 million in 2014

This represents the largest one-year contraction since the research firm began tracking shipments in 1996, beating the 9.1 percent record decline of 2013. IDC blamed the latest reduction in shipments on a variety of factors, ranging from larger-than-expected OEMs’ and sellers’ inventories to the ongoing problem of getting systems off factory floors.

The macro reason, however, remained the same as before: consumers have not bought new PCs to replace their increasingly-aging machines. They have instead opted to spend their money on new smartphones and, to a lesser extent, tablets

That doesn’t mean the PC is dead. “Despite the substantial shift in spending and usage models from PCs toward tablets and phones in recent years, very few people are giving up on their PC – they are just making it last longer,” writes IDC analyst Loren Loverde in a statement.

It’s thought that Microsoft’s free Windows 10 upgrade – available to the hundreds of millions of PC owners worldwide now running Windows 7 or 8.1 – hasn’t helped. “The free upgrade... enables some users to postpone an upgrade a little,” says Loverde, though, not indefinitely, he contends.

IDC is sticking to its guns, and predicts that at least some consumers would eventually upgrade their PC hardware because of Windows 10. “Some consumers will use a free operating system upgrade to delay a new PC purchase and test the transition to Windows 10,” Loverde explains. “However, the experience of those customers may serve to highlight what they are missing by stretching the life of an older PC, and we expect they will ultimately purchase a new device.”

Research firms such as IDC and its rival, Gartner, have maintained that consumers will refresh their home PCs at some point, but their regular predictions of that have worn thin. The buy-a-PC time frame has been repeatedly pushed out to a later date.

The silver lining in PC shipments, if there is one, exists because businesses have not – and for the foreseeable future, cannot – relinquish their workforce machines in anywhere near the numbers, or even percentages, of consumers. Businesses still regularly upgrade their systems, albeit often on a lengthier schedule than previously, as they migrate to a new operating system.

“Once commercial adoption of Windows 10 accelerates, and in combination with upgrades to steadily-aging consumer PCs, we expect demand for new PCs to improve for several years as replacements will also be boosted by the end of support for Window 7, just as the end of support for Windows XP boosted shipments in 2014,” Loverde maintains. Microsoft has set Windows 7’s retirement date as 14 January, 2020.

Other analysts have opined that enterprises, having learned their lesson from the scramble to dump Windows XP in 2013 to 2014, will be more likely to replace Windows 7 with 10 before the due date arrives. At the same time, Microsoft has been promoting its new operating system as ready for corporate adoption

IDC forecasts that shipments will stabilise by the end of 2016, and grow through 2019. Even that prediction, however, means that the bottom of the trough won’t come until next year, and the growth from that will be so minor that 2019’s shipments will remain below those of 2015’