PC Market To Shrink for First Time Since 2001

(MoneyWatch)  According to the latest forecast from iSuppli, 2009 will be the first year since 2001 that PC unit shipments will drop. The market analyst suggests that the unit decline will be 8.1 percent as the economy is still rough and uncertain. And that is a pretty grim prediction. Here's the firm's numbers for the last few years:

Note the obvious: the rate of growth in PC sales has slowed to virtually nothing as notebooks have expanded. According to Barron's, iSuppli seriously cut its projections for the year:

The research firm today cut its forecast for 2009 unit shipments to 287.3 million, or down 4%. The firm's previous forecast was for 0.7% growth this year. In 2001, units fell 5.1%.The biggest factor in the forecast: an expected 18.1% drop in desktop units. Entry-level servers, which are included in the company's PC numbers, are expected to be down 9.5%. By contrast, notebook units are forecast to be up 11.7%, exceeding desktop units on an annual basis for the first time.

For Q2, the company sees shipments up 0.1%, with sequential increases of 11% in Q3 and 8.9% in Q4. The third quarter will be down 6.5% year over year, while the Q4 forecast would represent 3.6% year over year growth. For 2010, iSuppli sees global PC shipments up 4.7%.

But while the drop in desktop sales have helped tank overall numbers, how much can you blame this on just the economy? That graph shows a more than middle-of-2008 trend. User habits are changing (or else the growth of one wouldn't look so clearly like it was at the expense of the other), and there is also the question of whether the market is starting to see saturation. As technology goes, the PC market is at least as mature as your grandparents. I don't know whether this includes netbook shipments, which are taking big chunks of market share, but it sure looks as though the dynamics that many in the tech industry have expected as a matter of course might have instead run the course.