Gartner: PC shipments slip 8.6% to 80.3m units in Q3 2013, the lowest back-to-school quarter since 2008
The PC market continues to fall spectacularly, seeing the sixth consecutive quarter of declining worldwide shipments as well as the lowest back-to-school quarter since 2008.
Context & Ripple Effects
The slide has been building all year: this is the sixth consecutive quarter of falling worldwide PC shipments, and the back-to-school season — normally the year's demand anchor — came in weaker than any since 2008. Gartner's own mobile-side numbers explain the drain on the other end of the ledger: smartphones outsold feature phones globally for the first time in Q2 2013, with Android alone holding 79% of the smartphone market.
The story travelled widely on pickup day, running through The Verge, NYT Bits, AppleInsider, eWeek, SlashGear and Tech Trader Daily alongside Gartner's and IDC's own releases — a sign that tracker firms' quarterly counts have themselves become the industry's scoreboard. Gartner's companion forecasts put $26B in 2013 app store sales against those shrinking PC unit counts, framing where consumer device spend is heading.
First-order effects
- Top-5 PC vendors — Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer and Asus — exit the back-to-school quarter with 80.3m units shipped, down 8.6%, meaning the seasonal refresh failed to materialize for the whole ranked field rather than any single player.
- Microsoft and Intel absorb the miss directly through Windows license volumes and processor orders tied to those lost units.
Second-order effects
- Displaced consumer spend flows to the categories Gartner tracks growing: smartphones and tablets, where Android's 79% share and a projected $26B app store economy capture the upgrade dollars PCs used to take.
- Vendors under volume pressure lean harder on price competition in a shrinking pool, squeezing margins for component suppliers and channel partners dependent on Wintel economics.
Third-order effects
- If six quarters of decline hardens into the norm, the PC settles into a mature replacement cycle for work-first buyers while consumer computing consolidates around mobile ecosystems — shifting industry power toward OS platform owners and away from box builders.
- Quarterly tracker reports from Gartner and IDC risk becoming de facto benchmarks that shape investor sentiment and vendor strategy in a contracting market, amplifying every print's signal.
The trend: Consumer computing demand is migrating structurally from PCs to smartphones and tablets, turning the PC into a shrinking, replacement-driven business measured quarterly by trackers like Gartner.