Flickr'd by Drab Makyo
The sales of new PCs — desktops and laptops and netbooks — has been on the rise every quarter since the second half of 2001. That’s a lot of quarters of continued growth, and the last five years have seen an average increase of 15%. But as we enter 2009 things are starting to slow down.
Laptop sales from the first three quarters of 2008 showed an average increase of 40% compared to the previous year. The last quarter of 2008, though, that increase dropped to only 20%. Still, a decrease in growth is still growth, right? So it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s probably safe to say that the netbook is one of the reasons that number stayed positive at all.
Desktop sales, on the other hand, took a serious drop. Not just a drop in growth, but an actual reduction in sales by 16% from the previous year. Despite portable sales still being positive, the major dip in desktop sales brought the overall PC sales volume down by 0.4% compared to the previous year. Guess it’s kind of hard to foot the bill of a new Vista computer when your XP machine is running fine and you just lost your job.