What They Say
Digitimes Research said that it believes that the surge in demand for notebooks, driven by the pandemic, may not be sustainable as it reported shipments of 247 million units in 2021, up more than 20% from 2020 and up from a range of 150-160 million before the crisis. Much of this growth came from working from home and from the need of students to have an individual device, rather than sharing, in more advanced countries. Hybrid working, as well as working from home, has also accelerated the long term shift from desktop to mobile PCs.
In future years, the firm expects shipments of around 230 million to 250 million as the installed base is now much higher. It also expects a wave of educational replacements and the maturation of the Arm processor market.
What We Think
I doin’t think I was a particularly early adopter of notebook computing as a replacement for a desktop – I used one as an add-on rather than to replace my desktop ‘back at base’. Eventually, I realised that I could just run the one system as disk capacity and memory improved on notebooks. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m now beginning to wonder, as my use of heavy database and spreadsheet work has declined, and with almost everything now available anywhere through the cloud, whether a move back to a convertible/tablet and a desktop might be my next move. Thinking about this reminded me that one of the key points about the PC revolution was that ‘one size does not fit all’ and that different use cases and circumstances mean that different configurations are optimal. (BR)
This chart from Digitimes Research shows Taiwan shipments vs worldwide
