2023 PC Unit Shipments Disappoint While Smartphone Fared Better Than Expected

Bad news for Intel, good news for Apple & TSMC

Despite their legacy end-market status compared to the rapidly growing AI acceleration segment, PC and Smartphone combined still account for >50% of all global semiconductor sales. As such, we need to pay close attention to their quarterly and annual unit shipments. We now have the Q423 and full year 2023 data from both IDC and Gartner.

For the record, our 2023 forecast was for a 10% YoY decline in both PC and Smartphone unit shipments. As it transpired, PC unit shipments actually declined by 14.8% while Smartphones declined by just 3.5%. That’s not good news for Intel but it’s particularly good news for Apple who overtook Samsung as the global #1 smartphone vendor by unit volume in both Q423 and for 2023 as a whole, according to IDC. Let’s dig in to the details…