PC market hits wall in 4Q, IT market to tank in 2009
 

Market research firm IDC reports that PC shipments (including portables and desktops) posted their first year-over-year decline since the second quarter of 2001, dropping by 0.4 percent. That may not seem like much of a drop but, given that the PC market has posted an average annual increase of 15 percent over the last five years, the sudden 0.4 percent drop means that the market just hit a brick wall.

The most dramatic drop-off in growth was in the red-hot portables sector, which makes sense, because that's where most of the growth was. Portable PC growth rates were a solid 40 percent year-over-year for the first three quarters of 2008, until the you-know-what hit the fan in the fourth quarter and the segment's growth halved to just 20 percent year-over-year.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...k-in-2009.html