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The world as we know it is over. Dead, done, gone. We no longer have anything to count on, or a method with which to count.
This is what the world used to look like. The direction has been a little depressing but the patterns have been set, we know what’s in store, year after year. Except for this year.
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| The (former) seasonality of PC shipments |
Notice how nicely the line wiggles, dipping at Q2, rising at Q3, with a nice overall predictable downward trend. Forecasting this market was easy. Was. Now no one can forecast it. Now it’s a random walk, Brownian movement mixed with Heisenbergian uncertainties.
The big two PC tracking firms, Gartner and IDC just released their second quarter 2019 findings and both of them, BOTH of them reported PC shipments WENT UP in Q2’19. In the face of a trade war that has sent share prices of computer and electronics companies on a roller coaster, when everyone is supposed to be hiding under their bed and not buying anything that can be plugged into a wall socket, when OEMs and distributors are having clean-out-the-inventory summer sales and consumers are at the beach buying ice cream instead of PCs, when all that was going on, PC shipments increased. That’s just wrong! Crazy. Unacceptable. We must have order. PC shipments rising in Q2 is anarchy.
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| UP? Q2 is UP? |
Not only is it unprecedentedly and uncharacteristically up, it is up significantly. Nine-percent quarter to quarter, and three-percent year to year. That would have been great results if it was in Q3, and fantastic if Q4, and really striking if Q1, but its just impossible in Q2.
So, it’s over, kaput, finished. Use can use any dart or Ouija board, tea leaves or tarot cards to model the PC industry now. It’s no longer an arcane and priestly art practiced by wizards and soothsayers. It’s just anyone’s guess now — what would you like the number to be?
The next thing you know some fool will come out and say the discrete GPU market has gone up. This fool is gathering numbers and awaiting company reports for the next Market Watch GPU report in early August — better look out, you don’t want to get run over by any flying pigs.
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