14 DAY TRIAL // Maybe saying that PCs are getting pushed aside is a bit much at this point in time, but there is no question that the world seems to be more interested in smartphones, wearable gadgets and 3D printers at the moment.
There's no way that PCs will go out of business this decade, or the next, but sales have been steadily falling for months now.
Case in point, the latest International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker found PC shipments to have gone down during the second quarter of 2014. More precisely, the drop was of 1.7%, leaving worldwide unit shipments at 74.4 million, give or take a few thousands.
The decline is, interestingly enough, not as bad as feared, mostly thanks to how people continue to move from Windows XP PCs to Windows 7 or 8, and pretty often this prompts them to buy a new and better PC altogether, especially on the business front.
Of course, the decline would have probably seemed larger if stuff line Chromebooks weren't taken into account, but they were.
Lenovo is in the lead, with 14.5 million units (19.6% market share), followed by HP (13.5m, 18.3%), Dell (10.4m, 14%), Acer (6.1m, 8.2%) and ASUS (4.1m, 6.2%). Europe, the United States, and Canada are the regions where PCs sold best, exhibiting shipment growth even. Unfortunately, the rest of the world offset their strong points.