Now Hear This!

Apparently there is at least one positive for the electronics industry when it comes to this near-recession, housing-crisis, $50-gas-tank economy: strong PC sales.

Gartner this week reported preliminary data on Q2 PC demand and noted that because there has been significant pressure on ASPs (average selling prices) and the cost of PCs, especially laptops, has been kept down, demand for PCs was up an estimated 16% year over year. The research company made note of Intel’s Q2, which was so good on notebooks it had some analysts cheering the company, as well as its stock, INTC.

In its report, EDN coverage of which can be found here, Gartner wisely cautioned that anything can happen in the second half, even though Q3 and Q4 encompass the back-to-school and holiday-shopping seasons, two big opportunities for consumer PC demand.

One thing Gartner didn’t discuss, though, was Vista’s impact on PC sales. And one can deduce that Vista did have an impact, although not the impact Microsoft had hoped for. While very few PC users have been rushing out to buy a new laptop with Vista on it, demand for Windows XP-based PCs was surely high as the time ticked away in Q2, closed June 30, also the date beyond which Microsoft will no longer license XP through most sales channels. More than 210,000 PC users virtually signed the “Save Windows XP” petition InfoWorld started and it’s no fluke that Apple’s Macintosh units shipped climbed 41% in Q2 compared to Q2 2007.

I, for one, decided our Mac-based home needed a PC (just to keep things interesting) and was planning to buy a Lenovo before the Vista deadline, but despite the low price, our funds had to be allocated elsewhere. That missed buy was also in spite of the healthy incentive check my husband and I received in Q2, just like many other American families. If I were a parent with a kid heading back to school and in need of a laptop, I would have spent that cash in Best Buy’s PC aisle before I could have blown it on something else. We’ll see sometime in October if Q3’s back-to-school PC sales are up or down year over year after the double-digit Q2 growth and incentive boost.

What do you think? Did fear of Vista PCs encourage Q2 sales? Did parents get spend their incentive checks on their kid’s school’s laptop requirements? Will Q3 and Q4 show a decline in PC demand on these factors? Voice your opinions below.

--Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News