Last week, IDC reported that, according to their information, PC shipments worldwide were down for the fourth quarter of 2012. Today, rival research firm Gartner released its own PC shipment numbers, and they agree with IDC that there was a significant slowdown in the PC industry in the last quarter of 2012.
Gartner's press release states that 90.3 million PC units shipped between September and December of 2012, which is down 4.9 percent from the same period a year ago. Gartner said that the launch of Windows 8 in late October did not do enough to boost PC sales. It believes the launch of Windows 8 was hurt in part by "somewhat lackluster form factors" from PC makers which "missed the excitement of touch."
Gartner believes that consumers are in fact beginning to change their buying habits when it comes to purchasing new PCs, and that's thanks to the presence of cheap tablets. Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, states:
Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC.
Kitagawa added that Gartner believes people who own secondary PCs will replace them with tablets rather than with a new PC. HP was the world's biggest PC maker for the fourth quarter of 2012, with 16.2 percent of the market. Lenovo was close behind with 15.5 percent and Dell comes in third with 10.2 percent.
Source: Gartner | Image via Gartner
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