July 2018 - the State of the PC market

So here we are a little past Mid year in 2018 - so here's a quick check in on the PC Market.

 According to IDC - the industry saw the first sales increase in over 6 years of 2.7% to 62.2M units sold worldwide vs 60.6M in 2017.

 The top five OEMs (HP, Lenovo, Dell, Apple and Asus) control over 77% of that market as the "Others" category continues to consolidate - showing an 11.4% drop in sales.   

 MS does not report Surface sale unit numbers - but based on their $1.094B revenue number and an estimated average selling price of $1000 - you can guestimate unit sales around 1.1M or around 1.7% market share.  Surface is weird as well since depending on the model may be considered a tablet or a PC and therefore counted differently.

 Total PC sales for H1 of 2018 are around 122- 123M units - so really about the same as last year.   So unless there are some earth shattering new releases that drive significant demand or some major upgrade cycles - 2018 should come in some where around the 250 - 255M unit range.

 According to NetMarketShare on the operating system side - Windows still holds the lion's share of all desktop OS at 88.4% - followed by MacOS @ 8.9%, Linux @ 2.23% and ChromeOS @ 0.3%.  And so even though Chromebook sales volumes are increasing - it will be some time before they even reach 1% market share.

 Within the Windows world - Windows 7 still holds over an 11% point lead at 43.3% over Windows 10 @ 32.0% with Windows 8.1 and Windows XP both around 5%

 Also MS has yet to reach 700M PCs on Windows 10.  This is long short of the 1B PCs they projected back in 2015 to be at by the end 2017.  

 On the browser side - Chrome is @ 61.2%, followed by Internet Explorer @ 12.1% and Firefox @ 11.2%.   Edge is at a lowly 4.1% just ahead of Safari @ 3.7%.   What this means is that only 1 in 8 Windows 10 users use Edge vs 1 in 3 Mac users using Safari.

 Bottom line is that PC sales are effectively flat for 2018 and will probably stay that way.  MS is not really being challenged from an OS perspective - other than their own inability to get people to upgrade.  So the only thing that might change the needle there is the pace of PC refresh.

 And even for those folks that do upgrade - most are not using Edge and installing Chrome instead.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ASUS RT-AC68U Router & WDS - a nice solution for a large home.

I recently had a newer Asus RT-AC87U Router die.  The wireless chipset never seemed to work well and first the 5Ghz bands started to fail and then the 2.4Ghz failed leaving my 25 wireless device household high and dry. So after some due diligence I decided to replace with 2 of the older RT-AC68U and implement a Wireless Distribution System (WDS) configuration. In the past - I've mentioned an open source router OS called DD-WRT.  The Asus routers come pre-installed with their version of DD-WRT.  Asus does utilize their own UI overtop DD-wrt and overall I do not like nearly as much as the traditional UI - but core dd-wrt capabilities are there.   Additionally you can flash the RT-AC68 with native DD-WRT if your so inclined. In my previous configuration I was also using an older Linksys 4200 running dd-wrt configured in Client Bridge mode that allowed clients to connect to the Linksys as well as use some of the bands to connect back to the RT-AC87U. While it worked - I felt that
Read more

Solar Storage - 2023 Update

  A few years back I published a 2 Part post discussing Solar Energy systems.  The discussion focused on all the due diligence and prep work needed and what were some of the key considerations around designing and implementing a solar system. One of the discussion points was around solar storage or batteries.  What were the use cases for batteries and if they were a good investment and should you incorporate them into your design. Back in 2020 - the math around batteries said no - that you wouldn't be able to break even on the cost of a storage system over its normal warranty life of 10 years. So here we are three years later and so I figured it was time to revisit.   There are two primary uses cases for solar storage.    First is what's called peak offset or peak shifting.  This is a concept where you utilize stored solar generation to run your home during what many utilities call Peak Periods that are part of a general category of rate plans known as Time of Day (TOD) plans.
Read more

Home Automation Platforms + Matter - Early Observations

For those of us who have been involved in automating homes by adding "smart" devices from light switches to thermostats, cameras, sensors, controllers, etc - there was always a challenge with managing the wide range of devices. While each OEM had their own app that would allow you to control their devices - you'd often end up with anywhere from 4 - 10 apps that were required to manage the entire home.  And depending on your product choices you also had to have hubs to communicate from your Wifi network to other RF networks like Zigbee or Z-Wave.  With many of these "hubs" they had native support across multiple vendors or you had to add plugins or provide specific OEM support. Some OEM apps were great, some sucked, but it became challenging to provide a solution for a client where they could easily manage their home on their own.  Between having to maintain multiple credentials/logins across the apps and even communicating which app controls what - it sometimes
Read more