How many personal computers are sold per year?

I’ve been working on doing a lot of research lately for a paper and I figured that I would share some of my findings.  The question du jour is how many computers are sold, per year.  This was an unusually difficult thing to find overall data for.  I did find one source, though.  I compiled numbers for 1975 through 2010.  The sales numbers  are shown below.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised by the fact that revenue per unit seemed to grow to a peek around 1990 and then drop dramatically.  My guess is that the amount that people were willing to pay increased as the sophistication of the product increased.  In the 1990’s the market became saturated with PC manufacturers.  At that point, the PC makers started competing on price and revenue per unit dropped.

There is a lesson about red ocean and blue ocean markets here but that will have to wait until another post. 🙂