Features

The future of the PC

Like Winston Churchill and the mainframe, the PC has been declared dead long before its time.

25 April 2022

Thibault Dousson, Lenovo.

Approximately 12 200 people are wrongly declared dead by mistake every year in the United States, often thanks to a typo. The PC has had the same dubious honour, if not as often. In 2010, American writer (and Pulitzer finalist) Nicholas Carr declared the PC officially dead when the iPad was revealed. The same death knell has been sounded repeatedly over the years. In fact, the PC has died so many times that there’s probably a virtual cemetery filled with tiny little PC tombstones. It’s also very much fake news.

In the first quarter of 2021, PC shipments grew by 13% as compared to the same period in 2020, and the big names of Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple and Asus dominated the market. According to Statista, global PC shipments are expected to reach 67.1 million in 2022 and 76.1 million by 2025. The research firm defines the PC as the desktop unit, not as laptops or notebooks, while Gartner defines it as server, desk-based and mobile PCs, which reflects in the different number values and assessments over a five-year period. In November 2021, Gartner revealed that PC shipments had reached 339.8 million units at an increase of 9.9% compared with 2020. As of January 2022, this had hit a decline of 5%, but not due to the sudden death of the device, but to lingering supply chain issues, among other challenges.

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