Industry watchers collectively cringed last week when market research firms Gartner and IDC each published second-quarter shipment estimates that showed a huge decline of about 11% on-year. That massive slide is representative of Windows 8’s continued failure to prompt consumers and businesses to upgrade, though a new wave of Haswell-powered laptops with huge battery life improvements may finally sway some users in the coming months. In the meantime though, it looks like Q2’s shipment decline might have been even worse than Gartner and IDC estimated.
According to Digitimes Research, which bases its numbers on data from its numerous supply chain and manufacturer sources, global notebook PC shipments declined 15.4% on-year in the second quarter, which is even worse than the 13.7% drop in the first quarter. Laptop sales outnumber desktop sales by a huge margin, so this is a very troubling trend to say the least.
Digitimes Research noted that Lenovo and Dell were the only two notebook vendors to see sequential shipment growth last quarter, as Samsung, Apple, Toshiba and other vendors all saw global shipments decline quarter-over-quarter.
