Now there's another thing on Earth that be can seen from space: UK lappy sales in pandemic-struck 2020
- Reference: 1613475006
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/16/uk_2020_laptop_sales/
- Source link:
According to sales data from IDC, almost 4 million PCs were sold in the three months ended 31 December, a jump of 58.5 per cent. Desktops accounted for 439,000 of these, down 33 per cent, and laptops jumped by 90.8 per cent to 3.554 million units.
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Liam Hall, senior research analyst at IDC, told us commercial notebooks grew well and even higher growth was reported in the consumer segment. Consumer desktops sales were up on the back of demand from gamers but less interest from corporate customers was evident.
"Overall in the UK we've seen it stronger than Western Europe," he told us.
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"A lot of people at home need to have the one device per person rather than one device per household," Hunt said. "The main drivers [are] work and study from home, and entertainment plays a big factor in this as well."
Ballooning sales of portable PCs were helped in no small part by the UK Department for Education's Get Help With Technology (GHWT) programme, which aimed to provide laptops to children from underprivileged background who were forced to learn from home under government-imposed lockdowns.
Everything must go! Distributors clear shelves of ALL notebooks in Q2, even ones gathering dust over last 12 months [3]READ MORE
The programme started in April and hundreds of thousands of laptops have been supplied to date with more to come. GHWT ran into trouble last month when it emerged that some laptops from supplier Tactus Group had landed at schools [4]pre-loaded with malware . The DfE has said it is trying to discover what happened.
Marie-Christine Pygott, senior analyst at Context, agreed UK growth was very strong, and reckoned, according to her figures, that the share of notebook sales to education had gone from a quarter of the enterprise market to 55 per cent.
This was due to the influence of GHWT shipments, which skewed average PC sales prices in the UK, with a year-on-year fall of 8 per cent recorded by Context. Pygott said that ASPs went up when shipments under GHWT scheme were removed from the equation.
For the year, IDC stats show that 12.15 million PCs were shipped to the UK, up 32.3 per cent on 2019. Notebooks units were up around 54 per cent to 10.1 million, and making up the remainder were desktops, down almost 23 per cent.
Relentless demand has continued into 2021 – a point noted by [5]Lenovo recently – with the GHWT programme being expanded, and demand from small businesses creating another "potential wave" of refreshes.
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As has been the case for years, demand is forecast to outstrip supply with a relative scarcity of panels due to remain a problem until midsummer. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_business/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YCv6KX35p2oYMNLXFeGIYAAAABI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_business/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YCv6KX35p2oYMNLXFeGIYAAAABI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/everything_must_go_distributor_clear/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/21/dept_education_school_laptops_malware/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/03/lenovo_on_pcs/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_business/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YCv6KX35p2oYMNLXFeGIYAAAABI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
[Context: my Dell laptop is about ten years old but still largely for for purpose. However, I've never calibrated the colour of its LCD display. When preparing point of sale artwork to be sent off to be printed, I first check it on my Samsung Galaxy, the office printer, and my colleague's MacBook. The OLED Galaxy phone, MacBook and and printer agree each other and, I've found, with the finished promotional material the printers produce. Close enough for our purposes.]
Whomever in marketing for laptop manufacturers could do with a kick in the nuts.
It's far too hard to get a device for reasonable money that has all the necessary items.
It seems all you can get are overpowered CPUs, alcking RAM and with undersized SSDs unless you pay a fortune. Even then generally you get an even more overpowered CPU with enough RAM but a miserly amount of disk space.
Screens are feckin tiny too, who actually want to spend a day at some working on a 12 or 13" screen. Not everyone has space for external monitors and keyboards.
It might be nice to have an actual selection of hardware in the market but they all seem make to the same specs by the looks of things.
Most of the problems are seen with the operating systems, designed for large desktop screens. The older laptops with small screens worked fine with the older operating systems - my first laptop ran MSDOS and was easy to use. Sure I couldn't do half the stuff I need to today but it did the job.
The one-device-per-person trend
Counts …
Hmm, I might be overdoing it a bit.
> demand is forecast to outstrip supply with a relative scarcity of panels due to remain a problem until midsummer.
[Assuming article means display panels] Samsung Dispay is finally getting around to making OLED laptop panels for OEMs. I don't know if this is related to any shortage of conventional laptop panels, or if Samsung has seen that there is a market for pricier laptops. Or maybe Samsung Display have improved their yields of bigger OLED panels.
There's also correlation with rumours of Apple bringing Mini LED displays ( effectively an evolution of the 'local dimming' approach, using thousands of LEDs behind an LCD filter to the extent that it approaches the contrast of OLED but with greater brightness. Further in the future, 'Micro LED' is commonly taken to mean one LED for each RGB LCD pixel, and it could be a contender) to MacBooks soon.