“The PC industry is facing extraordinary conditions as the global economy continues to weaken, users stretch PC lifetimes and PC suppliers grow increasingly cautious,” George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, said in the report.

 

This year’s decline will even surpass the figures in 2001, which was considered the year with the lowest fall, of 3.2 percent. But the predictions don’t stop here: the affected markets will be both the emerging ones, and the mature ones, even though the impact on these might differ somewhat.

 

This being said, Gartner estimated that emerging markets will suffer a 10.4 percent decline, while the mature markets will suffer a 13 percent decline.

 

Not all news is bad however, at least for mini-notebooks. The sales for 2009 have been estimated at 21 million units, almost twice the number of units sold in the previous year. However, overall, this has too little influence on the PC market to make a difference.

 

The advantage of mini-notebooks is that they are relatively new on the market, and people are still very interested in them. Furthermore, bigger machines also mean bigger costs, and considering the economic downturn, it doesn’t come as a surprise that consumers have lost interest in them.