The market research firm of Gartner has good news for the PC industry: Following years of continuously falling sales, 2015 could see a small hike of one percent. In 2016 growth should even rise to 3.7 percent.
According to Gartner, however, the upwards trend is powered solely by ultra-mobile devices. Analysts count among these, for example, the Apple MacBook Air and the Microsoft Surface. Sales of desktop computers and notebooks, in contrast, are expected to continue to sag. The PC market is also under severe price pressure, which is why some very cheap devices are very likely to hit the market this year.
At the same time, tablet sales are expected to increase further, but should show a significant slowdown in those growth rates. What has already emerged over the past year will carry on into 2015, according to the forecasts from Gartner: gone are the years of double-digit growth rates. Market researchers attribute this partly to constant extensions to product life cycles, as manufacturers continually keep their devices up to date with software updates. This in turn goes hand in hand with a low rate of innovation in the hardware, leaving customers with no reason to pay for merely slightly revamped models.