3.8M Fewer PCs to be Sold in Q1'12 Due to Limited HDD Supply
The market firm estimates that the industry will ship 3.8 million fewer PC than previously predicted as hard drives just are not as easy to come by. As a result, IHS now believes that the PC industry will not grow by 9.5 percent, but only by about 6.8 percent, which equates to 84.2 million units. PC shipments typically drop by about 6 percent from Q4 to Q1, but the limited hard drive supply will cause the decline to reach 11.6 percent, iSuppli said.
IHS predicts that worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter of 2012 will amount to 84.2 million units, compared to the earlier forecast of 88 million. The new first-quarter forecast foresees an 11.6 percent sequential decline from 95.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011. While PC shipments typically decrease in the first quarter compared to the peak holiday-selling season in the fourth quarter, the drop in 2012 will be far sharper than the 6 percent historical average decline.
"The PC supply chain says it has sufficient HDD inventory for the fourth quarter of 2011. However, those stockpiles will run out in the first quarter of 2012, impacting PC production during that period," said Matthew Wilkins, senior principal analyst, compute platforms for IHS. Wilkins expects the supply situation to improve during the first quarter. and a rebound of shipments could take place in the second half of the year. In fact, the market research firm said that there is a chance of hard drive excess supply in the market by the end of 2012 as the industry returns to full production in Thailand.
For the entire year, it appears that the PC industry will miss its 400 million goal once again. IHS believes that only 376 million PCs will ship, "partly due to the HDD shortage, along with weakening demand due to other factors." IHS says that "the bulk in reduction in shipments will be in the notebook space, which is the area impacted by the HDD shortage." The market firm also noted that PCs will continue to be impacted by the demand for notebooks and are likely to face strong headwind.

The first paragraph has a lot of the same stuff the second one does.
On the other side if they meant the branded paperweights, yeah, they're going to see a real downside.
The first paragraph has a lot of the same stuff the second one does.
Load of BS! How will an ultrabook help with storage?
Ultrabooks tend to use SSDs, not HDDs. As they're manufactured differently, in different facilities, there weren't any shortages with the Thailand floods. As a result, they didn't see the same price increases.
Chances are SSD prices may go up, but only a small amount: this increase would just be due to the increased demand for SSDs to take up the slack from HDDs, but also, due to the more robust semiconductor market, it could almost certainly expand production much better to meet this increased demand.
Looks like cloud storage will finally get off the ground
Yeah... I'm definitely not going that route. Call me paranoid, but I much rather keep an eye on my own data than trust it to some data-bank out there. Hacking, lost files, server crashes, shut down servers, spotty internet service for whatever reason... at least if i have the drive when something goes wrong i'm enpowered to do something about it. I couldn't care less if cloud storage utterly fails... but that's just my opinon.
On another note, that really sucks for the PC industry. They've already been under pressure and now they have to contend with a supply shortage on a critical component. I'd like to say this will help the transition to SSDs, but the price-point still isn't ideal there and the average consumer doesn't know enough about the technology to understand the tradeoff between SSD performance and HDD size. But, you've gotta start somewhere, right?
Ultrabooks tend to use SSDs, not HDDs. As they're manufactured differently, in different facilities, there weren't any shortages with the Thailand floods. As a result, they didn't see the same price increases.
Chances are SSD prices may go up, but only a small amount: this increase would just be due to the increased demand for SSDs to take up the slack from HDDs, but also, due to the more robust semiconductor market, it could almost certainly expand production much better to meet this increased demand.
The average consumer doesn't understand why these "SSD hard drives" (heard that pearl recently from some customer) are so expensive with such little capacity. I guess I gotta build a demo rig with an SSD to demonstrate the power to them
Most consumers don't realize that they do not need more than 100GB storage in their laptop. Is it really that difficult to keep all the movies/music/pictures on an external drive? (Then you don't need to sync data between your devices, as well!) Thus they look for laptops with bigger storage.
Ultrabook are just overpriced underpowered thin laptops. If you think about prices or performance then an ultralaptop isn't for you.
As for SSDs, they're overrated. They cost tons, sacrifices lots of storage and only decrease load times. I rather pay LESS for MORE storage and put that saved money on a better C/GPU.
You also forgot that they tend to have a lower TDP, are silent, and by virtue of having no moving parts, aren't prone to failure from being dropped, which can come in handy for a portable device.
True, they're worse on the price-per-gigabyte range, but the increase in HDD prices has closed that gap a lot. Hence my impression on why SSD sales will likely go up: the lower difference likely means that more people will consider the extra cost worth paying for what they're getting.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a whole conspiracy to make that happen. (Yeah I know about the floods and all that but news can always be twisted, like say, the supply being short when it isn't)
As if.
Yeah for stupid tools who have faith in it. With all the hacks being continually done, SONY, Facebook and on and on they can keep their pay us a monthly fee to hold your data crap.