You would think that with the exponential growth of smartphones, tablets and all manner of technologies, that the venerable personal computer would be dead, but it’s defiantly not. In fact, quite the opposite is happening with Worldwide PC shipments actually grew by 1.4 percent in the second quarter of this year, the first time the PC industry has grown since 2012.

In total, the industry shipped around 62 million PCs this past three months.

That doesn’t mean we should necessarily expect that the PC is having a resurgence or even a recovery, in fact, it may be merely just sticking around.

In terms of who’s on top, and who’s not, Lenovo holds the PC high ground sitting on an almost 22% market share, with actual second-quarter shipments of 13,600,000 machines tied with HP. These two are followed by Dell with 1 16.8% share, Apple at 7.1%, Acer at 6.4 and everybody else at 25.9 percent.

Collectively the PC desktop market shipped 262 million computers last year and is forecast to drop ever so slightly this year with shipments expected to be around 260 million units. The mobile computer market shipped 158 million units last year and is forecast to drop to 155, million this year, while the mobile phone market moved a staggering 1.8 billion, with a “B” phones last year and should hit 1.9 billion this year. Put it all together and you see a very healthy industry with sales closing in on 2.3 billion units this year.

It’s scary when you consider that in 1984 the question was whether computers would be able to move out of the back rooms and into mainstream businesses and homes, and today we all have at least multiple devices, with even our cars and homes fully wired in.  

Reporting for Computer Insider, I’m Bob Pritchard