Market research firm Gartner believes that sales of PCs this year will suffer due to increasing prices. However, it also believes that there will be a change of the next year as companies adjust to the end of support for Windows 7 in 2020.
High component prices are keeping the number of PC sales low. A situation built on a scarcity of DRAM; which affects all electronics makers. Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, also attributes rising prices to the increasing size of displays and demand for better graphics.
As a result, the PC market is expected to decline by 1.2 percent in 2018.
Not everything is bleak for PC makers. Gartner notes that there will be a shift of purchasing habits in 2019 as Asian companies look to refresh their devices. Official support for Windows 7 ends in 2020, which will force many companies to finally move away from the operating system and embrace the Windows 10 model of Windows as a service.
American and European companies have already begun the migration, and it is expected companies in China and Japan have put off the need to upgrade until 2018/2019.
In either case, this will not be enough to represent positive growth for the PC market; with the forecast for the next two years being extremely flat. On the positive side, it also means that losses should be kept to a minimum.
