Windows 8 Touch PC Demand is Strong, Say Analysts
PC vendors facing supply shortages, apparently.
Despite a number of industry figures and PC manufacturers expressing their doubts regarding the operating system's ability to succeed, Microsoft has seen strong demand for Windows 8 touch systems.
"Touch machines are actually selling above expectations," said Bob O'Donnell, a program vice president at IDC. "Some vendors are actually facing shortages because touch panels are in limited supply. Vendors are saying they can't get as many touch-based machines as they would like to meet the demand that they're seeing."
Rhoda Alexander, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, agreed with O'Donnell's comments. "We've talked to a number of PC makers that are having trouble obtaining touch panels and some of the vendors I've talked to said they can't keep them on the shelf," she said.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has echoed the two statements from the aforementioned analysts. Tami Reller, chief marketing and financial officer for Windows, said last week that there are "not enough" touch devices available for consumers.
However, IDC's O'Donnell added that non-touch Windows 8 PCs aren't faring as well, as mirrored by NPD sales figures. "The non-touch machines are selling below expectations. If high-end machines are selling better than expected. Great. But that doesn't make up for low-end volume machines."

I believe Surface pro, and surface pro-Like x86 capable tablets will have a huge demand if priced and marketed appropriately. meanwhile, I think the desktop may just turn into a high-end workstation, or gaming console, or NAS, essentially serving niche needs
Also, if you do not need the performance of Core i3/i5 tablets, there are several Atom based tablets which is a lot cheaper, some are even in the range of Surface RT. The battery life is much longer than Core i3/i5 models as well, at the cost of the CPU performance.
Next year the battery life may improves further and the prices are likely to drop when Intel releases new CPU, and vendors start to adopt AMD APU into the mix.
Why else would you play games than to entertain yourself?
Logitech has a neat pad that you can touch instead of the screen, and some of the other devices work without actually touching those screens, too; many of us don't want them touched, shuddering at the image of all those fingerprints marring the view, but I think having that kind of interface in addition to the keyboard and mouse will catch on when these devices get released and become well-known.
The Win 8 sales for desktops are no surprise, because people love Win 7 and have little reason to upgrade. Some of us do, even though we don't particularly have a need for the touch interface right now, but most don't, and I personally wouldn't recommend upgrading from Win 7 unless you had a very specific reason for doing so.
I plan to bump my Vista machine up to Win 8, mostly because of TRIM support for the SSD, but I'll skip Win 8 on my other system that already has Win 7 and TRIM support.
No s#!t, Sherlock!
For software development and other activities that involve a fair amount of document editing, a touch panel is useless. In enterprise environments, add to that the cost of migrating to W8, the cost of upgrading or changing any piece of incompatible software - usually this sort of thing has a ripple effect amplifying the initial cost estimations, the cost of retraining the non-geek personnel and an initial decrease in productivity for the others.
This is just a superficial analysis and you can already see the W8 PC failure coming a mile away.
If the demand is so good why does the largest pc seller in canada not have any even listed??.
Gee.
Yah think $500 low-rez (and pixel-pitch), high-bezel craptastic analog monitors might have anything to do with it?
I work in IT and am responsible for many systems at many locations. Win8's integration into Server 2012 is quite helpful, but there's nothing better than being able to have a lightweight touchscreen to do simple tasks on the fly.