The end of Microsoft’s support for Windows XP has not increased the fortunes of the PC market, as it faces another yearly decline.
Gartner published statistics for the first quarter of 2014, revealing that the PC market has decreased by 4.4%, with Q1 shipments coming in at 76.6 million.
China’s Lenovo tops the list of companies, with just under 13 million shipments for Q1 and 16.9% market share. HP comes second on the list with 12.2 million shipments and 16% market share. Dell, Acer and Asus round off the rest of the list, while the combined shipments of every other manufacturer comes in at 31 million.
Despite Windows XP now being discontinued and all support for systems that carry the OS now being stopped, it doesn’t seem as though this has made an impact upon the sales of new hardware, even though many are now being forced to upgrade.
Microsoft has started to make a stronger attempt at moving into the smartphone and tablet world as the PC industry continues to suffer, recently announcing its poorly titled ‘Windows for Internet of Things‘, a new OS that will be available to manufacturers for free. It was recently revealed that Microsoft’s Windows 8 was still struggling to make waves, as it charted behind Windows XP and Windows 7 in a survey of installed operating systems.
