PC sales have stopped growing, but tablets are driving the market up – PC shipments will reach 399 million this year

As the fourth quarter approaches, IDC experts are making adjustments to their traditional forecasts for the dynamics of the PC and tablet market. This year, they believe, PC shipments of traditional form factors will not increase relative to last year, while tablets will add 7.2%, collectively providing an increase of 2.6% to 398.9 million units.

Image source: NVIDIA

Of this number of traditional PCs, only 261 million units will be delivered by the end of this year, at the same level as last year. If we do not take into account the Chinese market, the traditional PC segment will still grow by 2.8% this year, as macroeconomic problems continue to constrain the growth of the local market. Huawei’s efforts to stimulate demand for tablets have led to the fact that in the Chinese market there is no stagnation of demand in the corresponding segment.

Some manufacturers of tablets running Android, as noted by IDC representatives, demonstrated a fairly aggressive marketing policy in the first half of the year in China, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as countries in the Asia-Pacific region, with the exception of Japan. Tablets are coming to market with faster processors, better displays and better connectivity. There is a cycle of device upgrades in the tablet segment. This cycle will not last long, IDC admits, as tablets are inferior in functionality to full-size PCs, and smartphones attract the attention of consumers more often when an upgrade is needed.

However, PC shipments are still expected to grow 4.3% in 2025 as the end of support for Windows 10 inevitably impacts fleet upgrades. Under these conditions, Apple will have the opportunity to win over some PC buyers. Its market share ultimately increased from 9.1 to 9.7% at the end of 2025, and in 2026 it has a chance to reach 10.2%.

Image source: IDC

In the foreseeable future, demand for new PCs will grow most actively in China, India, Japan and some Western European countries, but more due to the end of the Windows 10 support cycle than due to the emergence of new models with AI support. So far, the latter factor does not affect computer sales, as IDC analysts conclude. Corporations buy computers with AI support largely for the sake of maintaining their relevance in the future, and for ordinary users the benefits of using these functions are not yet entirely obvious. In the coming years, AI-enabled computers will remain more expensive than classic computers because they will also come with larger storage and memory modules, not to mention more modern and expensive processors. It will be a long time before processors with NPUs responsible for AI acceleration find their way into literally all price niches of the PC market.

According to IDC, 280.7 million traditional format PCs will be sold in 2028, and growth relative to 2027 will be limited to 0.6%, although shipments will increase by an average of 1.8% annually from 2024 onwards. In the tablet segment, there will be no consistent growth in 2028 (from the level of 140.5 million tablets), but on average over the previous five years, supply volumes will increase by 0.5% annually. The cumulative average annual growth rate in PC and tablet shipments will be 1.4%.

As representatives of IDC expect, next year the share of PCs with an NPU performance level of less than 40 TOPS will not exceed 40% of the market for desktop computers and laptops, while almost 60% of computers will do without an NPU. Next year, more than 10% of PCs will have processors with NPUs capable of over 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). By 2028, the share of the latter will exceed 60%, more than 30% of computers will be equipped with less productive NPUs, and only about 5% of new PCs and laptops will be able to do without NPUs.