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1 month ago
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WORLD WAR FEE The global PC market is ticking upward as Windows 10's end-of-life nears, except in North America, where tariff shocks and economic jitters have slowed demand.
Microsoft's announced cut-off date of October 14 for Windows 10 support has given PC makers a boost this year, as many machines running the venerable OS don't meet the stricter hardware requirements for Windows 11, prompting users to upgrade.
According to the market watchers at IDC, this led to global shipments during the third quarter of 2025 rising by 9.4 percent compared with the same period last year, with global volumes touching 75.8 million units.
But there are quite striking regional differences according to its reading of the runes, with EMEA and Asia Pacific converging on 14 percent growth, while the figure for the Americas during the same period is just one percent.
"While the entire market is continuing on a very strong year, fueled by Windows 11 transition and the need to replace an ageing installed base, the results by regions are telling different stories," IDC's research VP Jean Philippe Bouchard said in a statement. "In particular, the North American market continues to be impacted by the US import tariffs shock and by macroeconomic uncertainties."
This conundrum can be explained by IDC looking at PC shipments, which covers systems that have left the makers' factories and been delivered to the resellers and distributors making up the sales channel, rather than end-user purchases.
But those sales channels in the US are suffering from inventory indigestion, as The Register has previously reported, owing to front-loading earlier in the year to stock up before any tariff-related turmoil might hit.
The first quarter of 2025 saw shipments of new PCs rise, as the industry tried to move as many machines as it could before the Trump administration imposed its anticipated tariffs on China-made goods that would bump up the price of bringing them into America.
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Consumers, meanwhile, have been reluctant to part with their hard-earned cash for a PC upgrade while tariffs were pushing up prices in a number of key spending categories, instead focusing on essentials and avoiding costly, discretionary items.
What this adds up to is that PC sales in the US will not have collapsed as much as the statistics on shipments might suggest, although there are other factors at play, such as the selling prices being pushed up by vendors promoting AI-capable PCs.
Despite the steady drumbeat of sales, hundreds of millions of systems have yet to be upgraded to Windows 11, as the deadline looms. For this reason, IDC says it expects to see demand for newer PCs ready for Windows 11 continue to grow well into 2026.
According to IDC's figures, Lenovo was the top PC vendor in Q3, accounting for just over 25 percent of units shipped. HP was in second place at just below 20 percent, with Dell coming third on about 13 percent, Apple on 9 percent and Asus at about 8 percent. ®
