PC Shipments Slip Despite An Economic Recovery, Can AI Turn Things Around?

Practically every major PC hardware and software player is high on the artificial intelligence (AI) movement, with the latest processors sporting dedicated neural processing units (NPUs) and company's like Microsoft and its partners heavily promoting the Windows maker's Copilot initiative. Despite the AI push, as well as an economic recovery, global PC shipments slipped during the third quarter of 2024.

Both the International Data Corporation (IDC) and Gartner are in agreement in the decline, with the former highlighting a 2.4% year-over-year dip to 68.8 million units, and the latter reporting a smaller 1.3% decline to 62.9 million units. Curiously enough, yet another market research firm, Canalys, says that worldwide PC shipments actually rose, albeit just slightly—1.3% to 66.4 million units.

Whether it's a small dip or a minor gain, the last quarter didn't see big (or even modest) upwards movement in PC shipments, even amid a push into AI territory. However, that's not necessarily reason to be bearish on the market or the effect that the promise of AI could have on shipments going forward.

"Demand, without a doubt, has returned for PCs amongst consumers and commercial buyers," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "However, much of the demand was still concentrated at the entry-level thanks to a recovering economy and the back-to-school season in North America. That said, newer AI PCs such as Copilot+ PCs from Qualcomm along with Intel and AMD’s equivalent chips as well as Apple’s expected M4-based Macs are expected to drive the premium segment in coming months."

In other words, it's way too early to write off the impact that AI might have on sales. The other side to the argument is that consumers could already be experiencing AI fatigue, in terms of the non-stop marketing barrage from every angle. But with all the major players having released or getting ready to release new chips and products, we could see the PC market rebound sooner than later. In addition, the end of support for Windows 10 could fuel upgrades among business clients.

How much impact AI experiences will have on PC shipments is tougher to predict. It's not exactly been a smooth roll out across the board. For example, Microsoft ended up delaying the release of, and ultimately retooling, its AI-powered Recall feature over privacy concerns. And while there has been much hype surrounding AI, mainstream use cases have yet to materialize in a meaningful way, outside of a few exceptions, such as image generation.

"While we expect AI to reach ubiquity at some point at the end of this decade, the ramp up towards mass market will take longer than expected, well into 2026," said Linn Huang, IDC's research vice president of devices and displays. "The next year-and-change will be largely about developing software, use cases, and target audiences for this AI-enabled hardware."

The impact of AI aside, both IDC and Gartner also are in agreement with the market share breakdown among OEMs, with Lenovo leading the way, followed by HP and Dell to round out the top three. After that, IDC has ASUS and Apple tied for forth, followed by Acer and then all others, whereas Gartner has , Apple taking a slight lead over ASUS for fourth place.