New report shows that the decline of the PC market slowed down in Q3

Oct 22, 2013 00:51 GMT  ·  By

Statistics provided by market analyst IDC for the third quarter of the year revealed the PC industry fell only 16 percent as compared to the same period of 2012 to only 21.4 million units.

While the decline isn’t quite something to brag about, it’s still a sign that the continuous collapse of this side of the industry has more or less slowed down lately. The reason is, according to IDC, the imminent retirement of Windows XP and not the launch of Windows 8.1, as many might be tempted to believe.

"While it is too early to talk about recovery, the worse seems to have been reached in the second quarter of 2013. However, the ramp up is mainly in the commercial area, with September performance above expectations for most players," IDC computing analyst Chrystelle Labesque was quoted as saying by The Channel. "The end of Windows XP support in 2014 is driving IT departments to focus on hardware refresh," she added.

Windows XP will be officially retired on April 8, 2014 and by that time, Microsoft expects to move most users to either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.