It's not really surprising. Gamers are obviously still using PCs, the problem that Dell etc. face is that not many other people are.
Manufacturers are also stuck with the fact that a significant number of gamers don't buy off-the-shelf PCs anyway.
Exactly.
If PC sales are so bad, how did Steam reach 10 million simultaneous active accounts recently?
Where do the news outlets get their numbers? Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc.? [Yes] Have any of you bought any of these brands recently? There is a reason they do not sell well, they have become complacent and sell average expensive machines.
What about the non traditional outlets, like ASUS. MSI, CyberPower, DigitalStorm, Falcon Northwest, etc., are they counted? [No]
As Brun said, how are they going to count home built systems. These used to be insignificant, but the savings are moving people into building their own. And we are talking hundreds of thousands numbers here.
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OK, that article Panzer linked is really a sensationalist piece, and not good journalism.
Here is a more detailed article which describes that the decrease (which is just slightly lower than expected) was a result of the devaluation of the dollar (computers cost more abroad) and manufacturers pushing their windows 8 machines to make inventory space for the Windows 10 machines, therefore they are not selling new computers, but machines that have already been counted. These numbers are still normal for the end of a recession.
They have a summary of the manufacturers they used for the analysis a the end.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25955515