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| ?if you thought Do-It-Yourself PC builders were a dwindling breed for some reason, think again. Digitimes reports that ASUS shipped 5.6 million of its DIY motherboards in the 4th quarter of 2014 alone, which accounted for a healthy year-over-year increase of 6.3 percent. For the entirety of 2014, ASUS shipped a whopping 22 million of their motherboards. As someone who hasn??t tracked these sales consistently, that proved to be an equally surprising and reassuring statistic. One of the pricier but downright droolworthy 2014 motherboards: The ASUS X99 Deluxe Of course these shipments aren??t just to individuals, but also to boutique builders like Falcon Northwest, Origin PC, and Maingear here in the states, among the hundreds of worldwide companies who specialize in creatingboth budget and high-end customized computers. ASUS is one of manymotherboard manufacturers competing for market share alongside MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, Biostar, and others. It??ll be fascinatingto see if their competition also experienced growth in this spacelast year. While I love extolling the virtues of the DIY scene, PC growth in general is always fantastic news and only improves the ecosystem. Whichleads us to?? Slow and steady, PC shipments bouncing back Lenovo continued to increase its dominance as the world??s #1 PC manufacturer, with devices like the Yoga Pro 3 likely putting the hurt on tablet sales. 2012 and 2013 represented periods ofslight decline for PC sales, but in 2014it??s tablets that were sent on a downhill slide. According to the IDC Apple's Apple's iPadslipped 12.7% compared to shipments in 2013, which contributed to a wider drop in tablet sales of 7.2% last year. Last April I examined the specific impact of global PC game revenue compared to modern consoles, and concluded that the ever-evolving PC certainly wasn??t dying. It was simplyredefining its form factor. Research firm Gartner Gartner lends support to that theory with a cheap dofus kamas new report concluding that global PC shipments for the 4th quarter of 2014 increased 1% year-over-year. That??s the worldwide picture. In the U.S., that growth spurt was more dramatic: A 13.1% increase in sales during Q4 of 2014, which Gartner says is the fastest increase in four years. They attribute this to thin and light notebooks, as well as multi-use laptops with detachable or bendable screens (think Lenovo's Lenovo's Yoga line or Dell's Dell's Latitude 7000 series). After all, in the states we??re all about finding that all-in-one device. ??The PC market is quietly stabilizing after the installed base reduction driven by users diversifying their device portfolios. Installed base PC displacement by tablets peaked in 2013 and the first half of 2014. Now that tablets have mostly penetrated some key markets, consumer spending is slowly shifting back to PCs,?? said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. |
well as multi-use laptops with
