Too many computers
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Green IT, Blog, hardware on
Gartner has been coming out with some seriously big figures over the last week or so. I mean huge, even by Gartner standards. Take, for example, the little gem revealed in the “Market Trends: Worldwide PC Market Scenarios, 2Q08” report that says some 297 million computers will be shipped worldwide this year. That’s up 12.5 percent on the 264 million that were shipped last year if you believe the Gartner numbers.
The rise being predominantly down to the strength of the mobile market, causing a revision of the 10.9 percent growth that was being touted around by its analysts as recently as March.
“Mobile PC shipments exceeded our expectations in the first quarter of 2008,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “Mobile PCs continue to have strong momentum and the global economic environment is proving to be less punishing than we expected. Even so, it’s a bit premature to say PC shipments won’t be impacted by a weaker global economy, especially if oil and food prices continue to soar.”
Gartner also says that emerging PC markets will remain a key shipment growth segment, forecast to grow 17.1 percent in 2008 compared with 6.3 percent for mature market shipments. The emerging market mobile PC growth will do even better, 39.4 percent versus 19.1 percent in 2008.
“PC shipments should continue to maintain double-digit growth so long as emerging markets remain strong,” Mr. Shiffler said. “Emerging markets appear less imperiled by the economic slowdowns taking place in the United States and other mature markets than we once thought. However, rising oil and food prices are accelerating inflation in many emerging markets and this could begin to squeeze PC demand in those markets, especially if local policymakers respond by curbing GDP growth to cool inflation. Even so, it is unlikely that emerging market PC growth would slow so much that global PC growth would slip into the mid-single digits.”
But even those numbers pale into insignificance when Gartner rolls out the real big guns in its “Forecast: PC Installed Base, Worldwide, 2004-2012” report which claims that there are no less than a billion PCs installed around the world. Jump ahead to 2014 and Gartner suggest the figure will double to 2 billion.
That’s an awful lot of computers. Trouble is there is an awful lot of churn when it comes to computer hardware. Which means that, again if you put your faith in the Gartner research, some 180 million computers will be replaced in 2008 alone.
However the most troublesome number as far as I am concerned is also one of the smallest: 35 million.
That is the number of computers which will head straight for landfill, no recycling, no environmentally friendly stripping of toxins, just straight into the ground. Call me an old hippie (actually I am an ageing punk, truth be told) but that just seems an awful sad state of affairs…
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