​Lenovo dominates the PC market

The global PC market is still alive, but when Chromebooks and iPads are not included in the statistics, the resulting numbers fail to impress — especially if we compare them with the sales generated by the smartphone market. For example, the leader of the third quarter, namely Lenovo, only sold around 16 million PC devices, but this was enough for a market share of 24 percent.

Although the accurate numbers are not the same, Gartner and IDC delivered about the same results: Lenovo has HP breathing down its neck, and Dell tries to keep up with them in the third position. Acer and Apple trade places depending on the ranking (Apple is fifth according to Gartner and fourth according to IDC). Asus only shows up in IDC's statistics, while Gartner simply chose to include it in the "others" category.

In the third quarter, Gartner reported almost 19 million PC units shipped in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, which accounts for a 1.1 percent increase year-over-year. The same source mentioned a figure of 24.3 million for the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan). At last, we should also mention IDC's 17.2 million units.

There is no conclusion to all these numbers, but a few interesting things can be easily noticed. For example, many Windows PC users are building their own rigs, which obviously do not show up in such market reports. Chromebooks and iPads are quite popular in the US, but in the long run, mobile devices will probably turn the desktop PC obsolete. 

What do you think about these PC market statistics? Will we still be using desktops in 2030? What's the next step for the desktop PC as we know it?