News (not so) flash is that PC sales worldwide are on a steady decline. With the seemingly unstoppable rise in the popularity of tablets, sales of desktop and notebooks are faltering in almost all major markets around the globe.
And for an outsider looking in, it seems that even educational institutes are accepting slates.
But despite this, research firm NPD Group is reporting that PC sales in the Back-To-School period fared quite a bit better than they expected. It’s not all milk and honey, though, but the decline is not as much as feared earlier.
Back-To-School season is the time between June 30 and September 7 in the United States.
The reason why sales were not low as projected earlier was because of two factors — touched based Windows notebooks and Chromebooks. Prices on both these type of devices were axed to fit the budgets of parents and students, and that helped business pick up.
Stephen Baker, the Vice President of Industry Analysis at NPD said on this:
“Chromebooks and Windows Touch helped offset what could have been much steeper declines in the back-to school season. If the product’s available at attractive price points, consumers are going to buy it.
After a slow start following the launch of Windows 8 last year, touch screen notebooks saw significant and accelerating momentum during back-to school. The rapid roll-out of under $500 devices put touch much more aggressively in front of the key back-to-school consumer and created incremental demand.”
NPD notes that PC shipments went down just 2.5 percent overall, compared to last year during this time period. And touch enabled Windows devices accounted for a quarter of all sales during the Back-To-School season.
More impressively, no less than 33 percent of these devices were priced under the $500 mark, showing the clear way forward for hardware makers.
