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Everyone wants the PC market to stop its decline and start growing again. Gartner and IDC said Q4’19 was up compared to Q4’18. That happy development raised the whole year so that the average of the two firm’s reports showed a gain for the total year of 1.8% over 2018.
That’s good news, right? Well yes, but. If the spurt in Q4’19 was due to backlog (pent-up demand) and that’s now been satisfied, will we go back into a slump in 2020? Maybe not. If there was a backlog of orders that AMD and Intel couldn’t satisfy, wouldn’t the year’s total be about the same, just shifted a quarter or so within the year?
Gartner said worldwide PC shipments in Q4’19 totaled 70.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2019, a 2.3% increase from the fourth quarter of 2018, and IDC said shipments during the quarter were 71.8 million units, 2.7% year over year.
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| PC shipments over time (Ave Gartner & IDC) |
We are being cautiously optimistic and waiting to see what the GPU numbers look like, which we won’t be able to do until mid-February,