Global PC shipments are expected to drop 12.8% to 305.3M in 2022 while tablet shipments will fall 6.8% to 156.8M; combined PC/tablet market to fall 2.6% in 2023
Tumultuous times are ahead for the PC and tablet markets according to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation …
Context & Ripple Effects
IDC's September 2022 forecast marks the pivot from the pandemic-era boom to a correction: PCs are projected to drop 12.8% to 305.3M units and tablets 6.8% to 156.8M in 2022, with the combined market still shrinking 2.6% in 2023 — no quick rebound. That follows the last demand shock, when PCs, tablets, and phones were forecast to fall 13.6% overall in 2020, a dip that instead turned into a work-and-learn-at-home surge.
The forecast proved conservative. Western Europe's 2022 shipments fell 20.5% for PCs and 38.5% in Q4 alone, worse than IDC's global number, and by mid-2023 the market was in its sixth consecutive quarterly decline, down 13.4% to 61.6M in Q2 2023 — with only Apple growing.
First-order effects
- PC and tablet vendors enter 2022-2023 with shrinking unit volumes on both product lines at once, ending the two-year pandemic upgrade cycle that had inflated demand.
- The projected 2.6% combined decline in 2023 tells vendors the 2022 drop is not a one-year air pocket — inventory built for pandemic-era demand has to be worked off before shipments stabilize.
Second-order effects
- Vendor performance diverges sharply as the pie shrinks: by Q3 2023 Apple posted the largest top-five decline at 23.1% while HP was the only top-five vendor to grow, up 6.4% — share shifts to whoever holds commercial channels and pricing.
- Regional pain concentrates the correction: Western Europe's Q4 2022 collapse of 38.5% shows the downturn hits consumer-heavy markets hardest, forcing vendors to lean on commercial and enterprise refresh demand.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry settles into a replacement-driven market sized well below the pandemic peak, where vendor competition shifts from unit-share land grabs to mix, pricing, and premium segments — the dynamic visible in the alternating Apple/HP growth swings across Q2 and Q3 2023.
- Forecasters like IDC and Canalys become the market's de facto planning layer: their 2020 miss in both directions (too bearish, then the boom) and the deeper-than-forecast 2022 correction push vendors toward shorter-horizon, quarterly-verified planning.
The trend: The PC and tablet market is moving from a pandemic demand spike into a multi-year volume correction, with vendor fortunes decided by share shifts within a shrinking pie rather than market growth.