Replacement Indecision Will Cause Device Shipments to Drop

Says Gartner, sales of 2.4 billion units of all those devices combined will be a 1% decline from last year’s level, versus what the firm had expected would be a 1.5% increase.

Customer indecision has seen replacement activity across all types of devices decrease, according to Gartner.

Ranjit Atwal, Gartner research director, says users are extending the lifetime of devices, or deciding not to replace their devices at all.

By comparison, laptop and desktop shipments will decline 7.3% in 2015 over 2014.

“Users of tablets with a screen size between seven and eight inches are increasingly not replacing their devices”.

To upgrade, or not to upgrade, that is the question a lot of PC and tablet users are having trouble answering, according to a report Wednesday from the consulting group Gartner. Tablet shipments will drop 13 percent to 192 million units in 2015.

“In 2016, we expect currency impacts will negate and while Windows 10 products on the Intel Skylake platform will increase in volumes throughout the year, Windows 10 adoption among businesses will ramp sharply in 2017, where we expect the PC market to return to a 4 percent growth”, added Atwal.

Full-year global device shipments will edge down almost 1% on 2014, driven by longer replacement cycles, predicted Gartner this week.

All categories of device will see declines, the company said, with the exception of mobile handsets.

Only mobile phone shipments are now expected to grow this year, by 1.4 percent.

Sales of other ultramoble devices, which include tablets and clamshells, won’t fare as well, dropping from 226 million sales in 2014 to 199 million this year before improving to about 208 million sales in 2016 and 218 million by the end of the forecast period.

But it’s not just the PC market that’s experiencing a solid hit.

“Smartphones are the essential computing device and very personal, unlike PCs of the past, which are often used by more than one person”, said Tuong Nguyen, a Gartner analyst, in an interview.

Still, the latest smartphones are not being replaced as quickly as they were three to five years ago. Tablets are not looking fly, either.

Still, leasing plans and other inducements by device makers might not encourage buyers to exchange phones more quickly, unless the newest devices have more than incremental improvements, Nguyen said.