PC Market is Shrinking as Chromebook Sales Plummet from their Pandemic Peak

As the pandemic wanes, we're seeing a steady drop in PC sales.

Research firms, Gartner and International Data Corporation (IDC) have said that there is a fall in the global shipments of PCs in the first quarter of 2022. It is so because the pandemic-related purchases have started to reduce massively.

Gartner, on the other hand, puts forth a total of 77.5 million PC shipments in Q2 2020, which is 7.7% lower than the first quarter of 2021 according to IDC.

According to Gartner, a drop in Chromebook sales had a significant impact on the market — not counting Chromebooks, the PC industry would have grown by 3.3 percent year over year.

According to IDC, purchases from educational institutions slowed down significantly, suggesting that there was a lessened demand for ChromeOS devices in this sector.

Lenovo remained the top PC brand, followed by HP, Dell, and Apple. The aforementioned brands, however, were the only ones to show year-over-year improvement.

After releasing new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros last October, which come with the company’s in-house M1 Pro and M1 Max processors, Apple should’ve seen a rise.

At the end of last quarter, the tech giant Apple introduced its new Mac Studio desktop system, which bolstered the company’s desktop lineup in the third quarter.

In the midst of the pandemic, demand for Chromebooks was particularly strong in 2020 and 2021, as schools purchased up to hundreds of thousands of them to assist with remote learning.

In 2020, the worldwide market for PCs was up 11 percent, and over 30 million Chromebooks were sold.

Sales took a hit in the third quarter of 2021 owing to a supply chain shortage, however, they rebounded in the closing quarter.

Both firms agree that the PC market, in general, has begun to level off after two years of significant growth.

Businesses’ continued concerns about the war in Ukraine, which was also a cause of last quarter’s slow growth, according to Gartner.

“The emphasis shouldn’t be on the year-over-year fall in PC sales, which was to be expected,” IDC group vice president Ryan Reith added.

“The PC industry should be concentrating on shipping more than 80 million PCs at once, while logistics and supply chains are still a mess, accompanied with a slew of geopolitical and epidemic-related issues.”