PC market under pressure ahead of Windows 10 launch

Research firm IHS recently lowered its 2015 PC shipments forecast based on a soft first quarter. According to its report, 70.1 million PC units were shipped in Q1, a 2.6 percent decline from its April forecast. This represented a quarter-on-quarter decline of 13.5 percent and a year-on-year decline of 7.3 percent. IHS also noted, however, that upcoming Windows 10 and Intel Skylake CPUs releases may be making potential personal and commercial buyers hold off on equipment purchases.

While IHS does not believe that overall PC shipments will be impacted significantly by the Windows 10, it does expect an impact based on the heavy marketing that will undoubtedly accompany the launch in July. In addition, the firm expects that many commercial buyers of PCs are going to be cautious before buying new equipment with Windows 10 to ensure that there are no significant driver or other problems of the kind that plagued the launches of Windows 8 and Vista. Given that the OS will be a free upgrade for existing Windows 7 and 8 customers, however, the overall impact is expected to be relatively small.

More compelling is the hardware aspect. Intel is expected to release its new x86 architecture, Skylake, in fall of this year. The architecture features, according to Intel, show significant increases in both power and power efficiency compared even to its recently-released Broadwell-based chips. This could be a reason for delaying a purchase, especially for commercial customers.

The report does note more positively that Q4 purchases of PCs are expected to increase to about 82 million total laptops and desktops, a slight increase over Q4 2014. Overall, 292.6 million PCs are expected to be shipped in 2015.

See a comparison table of selected laptop suppliers on GlobalSources.com