We're not living in a post-PC world just yet, it seems. While last year's holiday season saw a 6.4 percent slip in global PC sales and the trend continued through Q1 of 2013, Taiwanese analysis firm DigiTimes reports that laptop sales are expected to rebound across the board for the second quarter.
Tablets are all the rage now, but until they're optimized for productivity the way laptops are — with keywords and multitasking functionality, we don't see them rendering laptops obsolete anytime soon. For entertainment and media consumption on the go, however, tablets, smartphones and phablets will reign supreme.
While hardware producers were expecting Windows 8 to bring PC and laptop sales back up to par, last year was in fact the first time in five years that laptop sales had slipped, down to 90.3 units from where it usually hovers around the 96 million mark.
With consumer intrigue focused on touchscreen interfaces, Gartner posited earlier this year that the rush to market tablets may have taken focus away from the PC sector, causing companies to put less emphasis on promoting Windows 8 and hardware that uses it. Microsoft in general has had a tough time in 2012, with suppliers pinning their hopes on Windows 8, but the fledgling OS has floundered somewhat since hitting the market.
DigiTimes says that after looking at PC companies' internal revenue projections from several laptop producers, Toshiba reportedly expects to bounce back 42 percent from the previous quarter, while Asustek expects 41 percent. HP comes in third at 30 percent and Apple projects that it will improve by 26 percent. Lenovo, Dell and Acer expect 20, 19 and 10 percent, respectively. DigiTimes also predicts that Lenovo will surpass HP to become the top PC seller again in 2013.
Other factors will also probably help drive PC sales back up, such as Intel's planned launch of its Haswell-based processors in June. Hardware built with the new CPUs will probably be featured at Computex 2013, also slated for June. And now that Windows 8 has been on the market long enough for users to be familiar with its interface and features, it probably won't be long before more and more users begin readily adopting it.
(Edited by Lois Heyman)
