The PC market grew only 1.3% in 2024

According to one analyst firm, the combined shipment of desktop and laptop computers in 2024 was 245.3 million units. That’s a big number — a new computer for one out of every thirty or so people on the planet — and it’s showing a growth over 2023. But with the previous post-pandemic slump in sales, and big pushes around AI and Windows 11, it still feels like a big disappointment.

The numbers come from Gartner, which lays out a lot of statistics for the global and US markets broken down by major manufacturers. Apple’s Mac computers and ChromeOS devices are included. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Asus (9.8 percent growth), Acer, Apple, and Lenovo are the big winners in terms of total shipment increase over Q42023, with HP and Dell getting small dips. Apple, Asus, and Lenovo showed the biggest jumps in market share globally, while HP had a sizable seven percent dip.

Restricting the focus to the US market shows a healthier shipment increase, 17.192 million shipments in Q4 with an increase of 3.5 percent. Asus and Acer made huge gains over the same period in previous year, 35 percent and 20 percent respectively, while Dell and HP were both down by small margins.

Gartner summarizes 2024 as a “modest recovery” for the PC market, with the consideration that 2023 was the weakest year in the last decade. Compared to 2021, when 340 million units were shipped at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, sports fans would say we’re still very much in a rebuilding phase.

Considering the hard marketing pushes this year, I can’t help but feel like a modest recovery is still damning with faint praise. Microsoft partnered with Qualcomm and most of the major laptop manufacturers to push the Arm-based Snapdragon platform, arm-in-arm with Copilot AI and a renewed plea for consumers to buy new machines and upgrade to Windows 11. Google had its own AI-focused marketing around Chromebook Plus-certified devices.

But since Microsoft and Google have both been forced to integrate AI features into existing software and web services while upping the price, it’s safe to assume that not enough people were interested in the original $20-a-month upsell. And while “AI-capable” PCs appear to be on the rise, it’s not at all clear that consumers are actually interested in those features instead of, you know, just buying a new PC. At the close of the third quarter 2024 Canalys says that 20 percent of new PCs sold were “AI-capable” (read: had an NPU), but only 720,000 of the sales in that quarter were the Snapdragon-equipped laptops Microsoft had so aggressively promoted.

Microsft is still pushing hard for Windows 11 with the out of service deadline for Windows 10 looming later this year, and opening up Windows on Arm to other chip makers like Nvidia and MediaTek might shake up the market a bit. But I doubt I’ll be contradicted if I say that the PC market is hoping for a much bigger jump in 2025.