The "PC is dying" nonsense is what article writers decide to blab about when they are about to hit a deadline and have no topic.
Let's look at this article piecemeal:
Market research outfit IDC has revised its prediction of PC shipments in 2015 downward. It’s projecting a drop of nearly 5 percent this year, worse than its earlier forecast of a 3.3 percent decline. In all, IDC expects 293.1 million PC units to ship this year.
What is a "PC shipment"? From the looks of the data, it only counts prefabs. This means the alleged decline could have a corresponding increase in people building their own systems- we'd never know, because they either do not have or do not provide that data. Furthermore, look at that prediction- they predict 293.1 million PC units to ship this year.
That is a big number. Is it smaller than previous numbers? Allegedly. But it's still a colossal number- it would take an average human heart over 8 years to pump that many times. To suggest that this data indicates that the "PC is dying" is a last-ditch effort by an incompetent writer to come up with an article 3 hours before the deadline.
To put that figure in perspective, Apple sold more than 74 million iPhones during the last quarter alone. At an annualized rate, that would put iPhone sales alone above IDC’s prediction for the entire PC market.
As they are saying, Q4 of 2014 saw 74 million iPhones. By multiplying it by 4, Look! That's bigger than the prediction for PC sales next year...
So?
First off, when you look at the other 3 quarters of 2014 instead of Q4, it becomes clear WHY they chose to just multiply that quarter's value by 4; It's much larger than the previous 3 quarters. for Q1,Q2 and Q3 respectively, Apple sold 51 million, 43.7 million, and 35.2 million iphones. That's a total of 203.9 Million iphones. Why, it's almost as if they specifically chose Q4 to multiply by 4, because the only way for their article to hold any weight is to misinterpret and fiddle with the evidence to make it consistent with your off-the-wall, click-bait title. They practically admit to this- "Apple won’t likely sustain that pace—it tends to sell more iPhones at the end of the year"... So why did they multiply the Q4 report which they KNOW to be larger than the previous 3 by 4 in order to misrepresent the results in a apples to oranges comparison?
then they give us this gem.
And not just in terms of the number of devices moving. The PC industry is also losing money. According to IDC, the PC market shrank 0.8 percent last year to $201 billion. This year, it expects that number to balloon to 6.9 percent. By 2019, the firm expects the overall market to shrink to $175 billion, or several billion less than Apple’s 2014 revenue ($183 billion).
I don't know what the "PC industry" is, or how the IDC report indicates it, since the IDC report is about PC shipments and appears to be specifically the shipments of manufactured machines. That hardly represents the "PC Industry" as a whole- are motherboard, memory, Video card, and expansion card manufacturers not part of the "PC industry"? And then the "prediction" says it is going to rise anyway- so even though it is specifically limiting the "industry" to the prebuilt manufacturers, it's still going to go up. (And why the constant comparisons to Apple? Apple's revenue includes part of the "PC Industry" revenue, given that they sell computers).
It's worth noting that IDC predictions do not have a good track record for accuracy. Bear in mind they also predict that Windows Phone will overtake iOS.
here is a good breakdown.
Basically, these "analysts" are really just giving idiot writers something to write about when they can't come up with a decent topic. "it's 9PM and I have a midnight deadline, I need to write an article and fast- I guess I'll just blabber about the latest IDC predictions, just like I did last year."
Even if they had a track record for accuracy- it's useless. They make a claim about the "PC Industry" as a whole, but the data only shows information on prebuilt PC shipments. One may as well argue that Oranges are going to be phased out of the market after the holiday season because Mandarin orange sales dropped. It's looking at a smaller portion of the industry and then trying to take data applying to that smaller portion, extrapolate to cover the entire industry, and then use THAT to predict the future.
