PC sales are finally on the up again as Lenovo tightens its grip on the top spot in the charts while Dell takes a dip

pcgamer.com:

Reports of the PC's demise are oft exaggerated. But there's no getting away from the fact that sales shrank for eight consecutive quarters—or two years in old money—after the pandemic-fuelled sales boom. Things have not been good, peeps.

Happily, the latest figures for the second quarter of 2024 from market analysts IDC paint a much brighter picture. Q2 saw PC sales grow 3% versus the same period in 2023. That follows a positive Q1 2024, which was up 1.5% over 2023, so this is more than just a blip.

Intriguingly, PC sales in China are down significantly. IDC didn't put a figure on China sales, but does say that if you take China out of the picture, volumes in the rest of the world grew by over 5%. Pretty healthy, then.

You could say the same about Lenovo, which very marginally increased its lead at the top of the table. Its market shared edged up to 22.7% from 22.5% for the same quarter in 2023. HP is in second place at 21.1% and Dell slipped slightly in third to 15.5% market share. Dell had 16.4% of the market in Q2 2023.

If it seems surprising that Dell is third and Lenovo number one, well, IDC says that laptops outsell desktops at a rate of about 2.5 to one, these days. And Lenovo is, of course, best known for its laptop PCs.

Indeed, Lenovo now makes some of the very best gaming laptops, with our fearless leader even opining that they had overtaken Razer's Blade portables in the competition for his mobile gaming affections.

Anyway, the IDC report says that smaller brands as a group saw sales shrink slightly, down 1.1%. So all the growth is in Lenovo, HP and, as it happens, Apple, the latter now holding 8.8% of the market thanks no doubt to MacBook sales.

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Overall PC sales for the quarter came in at 64.9 million. So we should be looking at nigh on 250 million PC sales for the year as a whole. IDC highlighted the buzz around AI PCs as a contributing factor and said