iOS shipments overtook Windows last year as PC shipments suffer record decline

There were more Apple iOS devices than Windows devices shipped in 2015.

It’s the first time ever that iOS has outsold Windows in a calendar year, according to Asymco, with 290m iOS devices (as well as 10m Macs) shipped versus 275m Windows machines. That latter number was down from 300m shipped in 2014.

Of course, note that Android device shipments outpaced the pair of them.

The news comes as IDC data showed that global PC shipments fell once again in Q4 2015, and by the biggest margin since it started tracking the data 20 years ago.

PC shipments hit 71.9m in the period, down from 80.4m in the same quarter a year before. That’s a 10.6 per cent drop, overtaking the previous biggest drop of 9.8 per cent in 2013. It’s also the first year since 2008 that total shipments have failed to reach 300m.

The PC market continued to face persistent challenges from longer-PC lifecycles and competition from mobile phones and tablets, despite the slowing growth in those markets,” the report said. However, economic issues like falling commodity prices and weak international currencies, as well as social disruptions in EMEA and Asia/Pacific that disrupted foreign markets were a larger factor for 2015.”

IDC does predict, however, that it expects PC sales to recover in 2016 thanks to the adoption of Windows 10 and the need to upgrade.

Apple has also added that iOS 9 is now installed on 75 per cent of active iOS devices following its release last September.