The PC: Back From the Dead, Again
The marked decline in PC sales in recent years has prompted many commentators to pronounce the PC as dead.
But those rumours may have been greatly exaggerated, if the latest figures from analyst house Gartner are to be believed.
While worldwide PC shipments declined by almost 10 percent in 2013, there was only a 0.5 percent decrease in shipments year-on-year during the most recent quarter of 2014. In the US and Europe the number of PCs shipped during the quarter actually increased over the year before, up 4.2 percent in the US and 9.1 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Lead analyst at Gartner Ranjit Atwal attributed the rise to a number of factors, but principally businesses refreshing their PCs running Windows XP, which stopped being publicly supported by Microsoft in April this year.