PC unit shipments worldwide quarterly 2009-2026

Personal computer (PC) unit shipments worldwide from 1st quarter 2009 to 1st quarter 2026

The personal computer has been written off countless times, yet it keeps shipping by the hundreds of millions. From around 296 million units in 2009, worldwide PC shipments climbed to a peak above 360 million in 2011, then endured a long decline, a dramatic pandemic revival, a sharp crash, and a fresh recovery, ending up shipping close to 280 million units a year by 2025. Tracking these shipments quarter by quarter, from the first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2026, lays bare the full story of a mature but resilient market that refuses to fade. The revenue these shipments generate is explored in our PC market revenue analysis.

The quarterly data captures both the seasonal rhythm of the PC business and its dramatic long term swings. PC shipments are seasonal, strongest in the third and fourth quarters as businesses spend their budgets and retailers stock up for the holidays. Layered on top of that rhythm is the bigger story: the smartphone and tablet era that hollowed out PC demand through the 2010s, the extraordinary work from home boom of 2020 and 2021, the brutal correction that followed, and the recent recovery powered by the end of Windows 10 support and the arrival of AI PCs. The parallel story in smartphones is told in our quarterly smartphone shipments analysis.

A note on the data is important. These figures cover traditional PCs, defined as desktops, notebooks and workstations but excluding tablets, based on data from IDC and Gartner, in millions of units. Annual totals are well established and widely reported. For the long quarterly series, recent quarters use reported figures, while some earlier quarters are estimated from annual totals and the well documented seasonal pattern of the market, so the precise quarterly values for the early years are best read as indicative of the shape of the market rather than exact counts. The overall trajectory is firmly grounded in the industry data.

What makes the PC shipment story so compelling is its repeated defiance of the doom mongers. Declared obsolete with the rise of the smartphone, the PC instead found new life, first as the essential tool of remote work and learning during the pandemic, and now as the platform for on device artificial intelligence. The shipment curve that follows is, in effect, a chronicle of how an essential technology adapts and endures, weathering disruption after disruption while remaining central to how the world works. Its place in the wider technology economy is set out in our big tech revenue comparison analysis.

Annual PC Shipments, 2009-2025

The table shows annual PC shipments for every year from 2009 to 2025, alongside the rate of change, the solid backbone of the quarterly series. The early rows capture the market near its all time peak, before the long slide that ran from 2012 through 2018 as smartphones and tablets cannibalised demand. The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 stand out as a dramatic revival, followed by the steep crash of 2022 and 2023 and a strong recovery in 2024 and 2025. Sorting the growth column reveals just how volatile the market has been, swinging from double digit declines in the mid 2010s and early 2020s to double digit growth during the pandemic boom.

The annual figures also reveal how concentrated the market's downturns and recoveries have been. The two steepest declines, in 2013 and again in 2022 and 2023, both followed periods of unusually strong demand, the netbook and Windows upgrade cycles in the earlier case and the pandemic surge in the latter. In each instance the market overshot on the way up and then corrected sharply, a pattern that recurs throughout the PC industry. Reading the table from top to bottom is, in effect, a tour through more than fifteen years of technology shifts, economic cycles and changing work patterns, all of which left their mark on how many PCs the world chose to buy in any given year.

The PC Roller Coaster: Annual Growth

Plotting annual growth lays bare the PC market's roller coaster. After modest growth into the 2011 peak, shipments fell for years, with double digit declines in 2013 and 2015 as the smartphone and tablet era squeezed the PC. A brief recovery in 2019 was followed by the explosive pandemic boom, with shipments jumping 13 percent in 2020 and another 16 percent in 2021. That boom then reversed brutally, with shipments crashing 16 percent in 2022 and a further 17 percent in 2023, before a strong rebound of 9 percent in 2024 and 6 percent in 2025, driven by the Windows 11 transition and AI PCs.

This extreme volatility is characteristic of a mature durable goods market buffeted by external forces. The pandemic pulled years of PC demand forward into 2020 and 2021, leaving a deep hole that took until 2024 to fill. The recent recovery has been powered by a specific catalyst: the end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025, which forced businesses to upgrade aging fleets, combined with the marketing push behind AI PCs. The role of artificial intelligence in driving this latest cycle is examined in our artificial intelligence worldwide statistics overview.

It is worth noting how unusual the recent growth has been in historical terms. For most of the 2010s, a year of flat or slightly positive shipments counted as a good result, as the market managed a gradual decline rather than a collapse. The pandemic boom and the 2024 and 2025 recovery therefore stand out as rare bright spots in an otherwise mature market. Whether the latest upswing proves durable or simply borrows from future demand remains the central question, and the answer will shape vendor strategies, component orders and pricing across the industry for years to come, with the memory shortage adding a fresh layer of uncertainty to an already difficult forecast.

Five Billion PCs and Counting

Adding up every quarter since 2009 reveals a staggering total: roughly 5 billion PCs shipped worldwide between 2009 and 2025. Even in its worst years, the industry still ships well over 240 million units, a testament to the enduring centrality of the PC to work, education and creativity. The cumulative line climbs steadily, underlining that while the PC may no longer be a growth market in the way it once was, it remains a vast and recurring one. This enormous installed base anchors the productivity economy in a way no other device can match, as explored in our internet companies revenue analysis.

The cumulative figure also highlights how the rewards of this market flow to a concentrated group of vendors and component makers. With around 5 billion machines shipped over the period, even a slowly growing or flat market represents an enormous and dependable revenue stream for the companies that dominate it. It is this vast base of devices, replaced on a multi year cycle, that makes the PC market so strategically valuable despite its maturity, and that the leading brands have learned to monetise through services, accessories and premium upgrades, a pattern detailed in our largest source of revenue of leading tech companies analysis.

PC Shipments by Era

Grouping the years into eras captures the market's three phases. The peak era of 2009 to 2012 averaged around 341 million units a year, near the all time high. The decline era of 2013 to 2018 saw the average fall to roughly 280 million as smartphones and tablets ate into PC demand. The cycle era of 2019 to 2025 has averaged about 285 million units a year, but that average hides enormous swings, from the pandemic peak of 349 million in 2021 to the trough of 242 million in 2023. The market has stabilised at a level well below its early peak, but it has proved far more durable than once feared.

The era view makes clear that the PC market never returned to the heights of its early 2010s peak, yet it also never collapsed. Instead, it found a new, lower equilibrium, sustained by the irreplaceable role of the PC in productivity, content creation and gaming. The recent cycle, with its pandemic spike and subsequent volatility, shows a market that remains highly sensitive to external shocks but fundamentally stable in its underlying demand. The broader economic forces shaping this demand are explored in our global economy overview.

It is striking that even the cycle era average of around 285 million units a year sits comfortably above the levels many analysts feared during the darkest days of the smartphone era, when some predicted the PC would dwindle into irrelevance. Instead, the market found a floor and held it, proving that reports of the death of the PC were greatly exaggerated. The device remains indispensable for any task that demands a keyboard, a large screen and serious processing power, a category of work that has, if anything, grown in the era of remote collaboration and content creation, ensuring the PC a durable place even as smaller devices proliferate around it.

The Second-Half Effect: Seasonality

PC shipments follow a clear seasonal pattern, and the quarterly data makes it unmistakable. The third and fourth quarters are consistently the strongest, as businesses spend their annual budgets, students prepare for the new academic year, and retailers stock up for the holiday season. The first quarter is typically the weakest, following the holiday surge. This seasonality is remarkably consistent year to year, which is why analysts always compare a quarter with the same quarter a year earlier rather than the preceding one, to strip out the predictable seasonal swings.

Understanding this rhythm is essential for reading the headline numbers correctly. A decline from the fourth quarter to the first quarter is normal seasonality, not a sign of weakness, whereas a year on year fall in any given quarter is a genuine warning. The seasonal concentration in the second half of the year also shapes the competitive calendar, with vendors timing new product launches and promotions to capture back to school and holiday demand. For the PC industry, the second half of the year is where much of the annual battle for market share is won or lost.

The seasonal pattern also interacts with the broader cycles in revealing ways. During the pandemic boom, the usual seasonal peaks were amplified as demand ran hot all year, while in the depths of the 2023 downturn even the normally strong fourth quarter struggled. This interplay between predictable seasonality and unpredictable cycles is what makes forecasting PC shipments so challenging, and why even the largest research firms regularly revise their estimates as new data arrives. For anyone tracking the market, separating the seasonal signal from the underlying trend is the essential first step toward understanding where shipments are truly heading.

The Recovery: 2023 to 2026

Zooming in on the most recent quarters, from early 2023 to early 2026, shows a market that staged an impressive recovery. After the brutal correction of 2022 and 2023, when shipments slumped to multi year lows, the market returned to growth from 2024 onward. The recovery accelerated through 2025, with the third quarter reaching nearly 76 million units, as the Windows 10 end of support deadline and AI PC marketing drove a wave of upgrades. Businesses in particular rushed to replace aging fleets, lifting commercial PC shipments and powering some of the strongest growth the market had seen in years.

That momentum carried into early 2026, but with a crucial twist. PC shipments rose to around 63 million units in the first quarter of 2026, but analysts warned the growth was artificially inflated by vendors and channels building up inventory ahead of expected price hikes. A severe shortage of memory components, which sharply raised costs, is forecast to push PC prices up by nearly a fifth in 2026 and drag full year shipments into a double digit decline. The recovery, in other words, may have already peaked, with a difficult year ahead as the memory crunch bites.

The contrast between the headline growth and the underlying caution from analysts captures the strange position the PC market found itself in entering 2026. On paper, shipments were still rising, extending the recovery that had begun two years earlier. Beneath the surface, however, the drivers had shifted from genuine demand to defensive buying, as companies and channels stocked up before prices climbed. This kind of demand pulled forward rarely ends well, and the months ahead were widely expected to bring the payback, with shipments falling as the inflated inventories were worked through and higher prices deterred buyers across both the consumer and commercial segments.

Strong Growth, Fragile Foundations

Viewing the recent quarters through year on year growth makes the recovery, and its fragility, clear. From early 2024 through the end of 2025, almost every quarter posted strong year on year growth, with gains approaching 10 percent in the strongest periods as the Windows 11 transition and AI PC demand drove upgrades. This run of growth marked a decisive turnaround from the declines of 2022 and 2023 and fuelled optimism that the PC market had firmly recovered. The strength was real, but it was also borrowing demand from the future, as the Windows 10 deadline concentrated years of upgrades into a short window.

The first quarter of 2026 illustrates the precariousness of the situation. While shipments still grew year on year, analysts cautioned that the growth reflected pre emptive buying ahead of price rises rather than genuine underlying demand. With the memory shortage set to push prices sharply higher and the Windows upgrade wave largely complete, the outlook for the rest of 2026 is for renewed decline. The episode is a reminder that the PC market remains acutely sensitive to component costs, software cycles and the broader economy, capable of swinging from boom to bust with little warning.

Who Ships the Most PCs

The hundreds of millions of PCs shipped each year are dominated by a handful of global brands. Lenovo leads the market with around a quarter of all units, followed by HP and Dell, the three together accounting for roughly 60 percent of PCs shipped. Apple sits fourth at around 9 percent by units, though it captures a far larger share of revenue and profit thanks to its premium Mac pricing, while ASUS, Acer and a tail of smaller brands make up the rest. This concentrated structure gives the leading vendors significant scale advantages in a fiercely competitive market.

The vendor landscape has consolidated significantly over the life of the PC market. Where once dozens of brands competed, the market is now firmly in the hands of a few giants, with the top five capturing the overwhelming majority of shipments. This consolidation reflects the brutal economics of a mature hardware market, where scale is essential to negotiate component costs and sustain razor thin margins. Apple stands apart by competing almost entirely at the premium end, a strategy that, as in smartphones, lets it capture outsized profits from a modest unit share, as detailed in our Apple total net sales analysis.

The competitive dynamics in PCs echo those in the smartphone market, where a handful of brands also dominate global shipments while a long tail of smaller players fights for the remainder. The same forces of scale, brand and distribution that shape the PC vendor rankings apply across consumer electronics, as set out in our smartphone market share by vendor analysis. In PCs, the stability of the top rankings over many years underlines how difficult it now is for a new entrant to break into a market defined by thin margins, enormous fixed costs and the deep relationships that the incumbents have built with corporate buyers and retail channels alike.

The PC Arc in Five Quarters

A handful of milestone quarters trace the PC market's entire arc. In the first quarter of 2009, the industry shipped around 70 million units. By the peak in late 2011, a single quarter could exceed 90 million. The pandemic drove another surge, with the fourth quarter of 2021 reaching around 94 million units, before the crash brought the first quarter of 2023 down to roughly 54 million, a multi year low. The first quarter of 2026 came in near 63 million as the recovery began to falter. Together these quarters span the market's peak, decline, revival and renewed uncertainty.

What stands out across these milestones is the market's remarkable resilience within a clear long term plateau. The PC never reclaimed its early 2010s peak, but neither did it collapse, instead settling into a cyclical pattern around a high base. Each shock, whether the smartphone era, the pandemic or the memory shortage, reshaped the market without destroying it. This durability reflects the PC's status as an essential tool that billions of people and businesses rely on and replace on a regular cycle, guaranteeing a steady flow of shipments regardless of the prevailing economic weather.

These milestone quarters also serve as useful reference points for anyone trying to gauge where the market sits at any given moment. A quarter above ninety million units signals a market running hot, as in the pandemic peak, while anything near or below sixty million points to genuine weakness, as in the 2023 trough. The first quarter of 2026, at around sixty three million units, sits in the middle of that range, neither booming nor collapsing, a fitting summary of a mature market navigating yet another period of uncertainty as it has so many times before, and as it will surely do again.

Fewer Units, Steadier Money: Shipments vs Revenue

Setting shipments against revenue reveals the premiumisation that defines the modern PC market. While unit shipments have swung wildly and remain volatile, the revenue generated by those units has been steadier, because the average price of a PC has risen as buyers trade up to more capable, premium machines. Indexing both measures to 2018 shows revenue holding up better than units through the post pandemic correction, evidence that the market is increasingly driven by value rather than volume. The full revenue picture, including the rising average price of a PC, is a story of premiumisation playing out across the industry.

This shift toward value over volume has accelerated with the arrival of AI PCs, which command premium prices and which vendors hope will spark a sustained upgrade cycle. AI capable machines accounted for a growing share of shipments through 2025 and are expected to become the majority of the market within a few years. Combined with the memory driven price increases now sweeping the industry, this premiumisation means PC revenue is likely to prove more resilient than unit shipments in the difficult period ahead. The way these devices underpin the digital economy mirrors the smartphone, whose revenue is tracked in our worldwide smartphone market revenue analysis.

Taken together, the quarterly data tells the complete story of the PC, from a market near its all time peak in 2009 to a mature, cyclical industry shipping close to 280 million units a year today. The PC weathered the smartphone era, boomed during the pandemic, crashed, and recovered on the back of the Windows 11 transition and AI PCs, with roughly 5 billion machines shipped over the period. By early 2026, a memory shortage threatened to tip the market back into decline, a reminder of its enduring sensitivity to supply shocks.

Yet for all its volatility, the PC endures as an indispensable tool for work, learning and creation, shipping in volumes that would have seemed unimaginable when the personal computer first appeared. The questions ahead are whether AI PCs can drive a genuine new upgrade cycle, how severely the memory shortage will bite, and whether the market can hold its ground as computing continues to evolve. The market value of the companies competing for these shipments is examined in our biggest companies by market value overview. Whatever the next few quarters bring, the long sweep of the data leaves one conclusion hard to escape: the personal computer has proved far more durable than almost anyone predicted, and it is likely to remain a fixture of the technology landscape for many years yet.

Frequently Asked Questions: PC Shipments