Gartner and IDC estimate PC shipments of 58.5M in Q1 2019, with Gartner reporting shipments down 4.6% YoY, and IDC reporting them down 3% YoY
The PC market is still in decline, according to research firms Gartner and IDC. That's nothing new for the duo to agree on, but coincidentally they also …
Context & Ripple Effects
After two quarters that looked like stabilization — an essentially flat Q1 2018 and a flat Q3 2018 in which Gartner even noted Microsoft breaking into the US top five — both trackers now agree the market slipped back into decline in Q1 2019 at 58.5M units. The disagreement is only about magnitude: Gartner has shipments down 4.6% YoY, IDC down 3%.
That matters because the 2018 flatline was the first sign in years that the post-2015 collapse — when Gartner and IDC recorded declines of 9.5% and 11.8% in a single quarter — might be bottoming out. A renewed drop suggests the stabilization was timing, not a trend change.
First-order effects
- HP, which held the top vendor spot through the flat 2018 quarters per IDC, is selling into a market that just shrank again, as are Dell, Lenovo, and Apple — the same vendor set where Apple was once the only top-five grower during the 2015-16 slide.
Second-order effects
- With demand contracting again, the competitive pressure behind Microsoft's push into the US top five intensifies: software-and-services players taking share squeezes traditional OEM margins exactly when unit volumes stop growing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — flat quarters punctuated by renewed declines rather than recovery — the PC market settles into a long replacement-driven contraction, foreshadowing the four consecutive quarterly drops to ~65-67M units that Gartner, IDC, and Canalys would later report for Q4 2022.
The trend: The PC market is cycling between brief flat spells and renewed declines inside a decade-long contraction, with each tracker agreement on direction carrying more signal than their gap in magnitude.