PC Sales Will Fall Another 8.7% by the End of This Year

Although the new Intel Skylake processor has been launched this August together with the new Windows 10, analysts believe sales will continue dropping even more until the end of 2015.

The past few quarters of 2015 have been gruesome for PC retailers and manufacturers as they have seen their products lying on their shelves untouched while the mobile markets soared to new heights. While people hoped that their revenues would eventually return after the Skylake launch and a new operating system from Windows would leave its mark, it seems some people are skeptical of this happening anytime soon.

International Data Corp. believes that, in fact, the trend of bad PC sales will continue until 2017. IDC also predicts that PC shipments will drop by 8.7 percent in 2015 and will continue downwards through 2016.

With some hope and a larger offer of the newer, denser 14nm process manufactured chips in CPUs and graphics cards, a slow revival in PC components sales might return two years from now. Apparently, the main reason for slow PC sales at the moment is the global economic situation, especially the Chinese market, and large retail inventories packed with old-generation hardware.

Politics, Chinese financial fallout and free Windows 10 killed the PC

Another reason is the free Windows 10 upgrade that is very much a perfect retrofit on older hardware, prompting PC users to delay their hardware upgrades on a later date.

In addition, it seems that PCs tend to get more expensive since major currencies like the ruble and the yuan depreciated massively in the current political and economic climate, killing major PC hardware markets like China and Russia. This way, users faced with financial constraints will choose to delay their new acquisitions and rely on older tech for a little while.

IDC believes that a slight improvement of sales will return in 2017 during a next refresh, cycle, although not much will change hardware-wise, not even in 2017, while the mobile PCs will easily dominate the market until then, with slim laptops and convertible solutions being a favorite among users who will desire better performance crammed into a slim envelope for mobility instead of the blocky and immovable tower PCs we all know, and maybe love.