How the Post-Pandemic PC Market Developed

After the pandemic run of 2020 and 2021 pushing annual PC shipments past the 300-million mark, quarterly sales have been declining since 2022. Between January and March 2024, shipment numbers rose again year over year to between 57 and 60 million units, according to data by IDC and Canalys. However, these numbers are still a far cry from the same period of 2022.

Our chart shows that global laptop, desktop and workstation shipments stood at 80 million for the first quarter of 2022, which was already a decrease compared to the first quarter of 2021, signifying a market slowly becoming saturated and coinciding with pandemic-related restrictions of movement being eased and in some cases lifted in many countries around the world.

As Worldwide Mobile Devices Tracker Group President at IDC, Ryan Reith, said at the time, this development was to be expected. "The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges", said Reid.

As in many other industries, PC vendors are looking to AI to boost sales for the remaining three quarters of 2024. Companies like Dell and Microsoft have already announced new "AI-first" product lines like Copilot+ laptops, which reportedly run compute-heavy AI applications on-device thanks to a dedicated AI chip instead of going through data centers in the cloud at a comparatively low price point, according to Reuters. Whether these new notebooks can revitalize a market that's been shrinking for the past ten years, apart from the short-lived pandemic growth burst, remains to be seen.