Another side effect of COVID: lots of laptops being sold to enable working from home

The one-device-per-person trend caused by the pandemic fuelled a boom in notebook sales across Britain in Q4 that resulted in a near year-on-year doubling of shipment growth.

According to sales data from IDC, almost 4 million PCs were sold in the three months ended 31 December, a jump of 58.5 per cent. Desktops accounted for 439,000 of these, down 33 per cent, and laptops jumped by 90.8 per cent to 3.554 million units.

Liam Hall, senior research analyst at IDC, told The Register: commercial notebooks grew well and even higher growth was reported in the consumer segment. Consumer desktops sales were up on the back of demand from gamers but less interest from corporate customers was evident.

The above is born out by availability (limited / poor) & pricing (strong upward trend) - affecting decent quality laptops, webcams, etc. This started as soon as COVID lockdown #1 was mooted & working from home kicked off.

In other news: Chromebooks outsold Macs worldwide in 2020, cutting into Windows market share. 

www.theregister.com