IDC report says rise of home offices means a growing PC market for U.S. households -- The portable computer market may be growing faster than the market for desktops, in part because of the rising number of home offices in the United States, according to a report by IDC. The number of home offices in the U.S. will grow from 33.1 million at the end of 2004 to 37.7 million by 2009, meaning an increase of customers likely to purchase advanced, portable, or multiple PCs, analyst Merle Sandler said on Monday. IDC defines home offices as those used by telecommuters or employees working after-hours as well as income-generating offices. Household PC penetration is near 90 percent. Within those households, at the end of 2004 portable computers were at 43.4 percent and growing. At the end of 2003, that number was 42 percent. �Households with home offices are less likely to let the kids near the computers, because of the important information in them. So they�re more likely to buy computers for students to do their homework on,� said Ms. Sandler, lead author of the June 8 report. �Home offices continue to upgrade or add additional PCs, especially higher-margin portable PCs.�
Semiconductor forecasts rarely move enough to reshape an enterprise boardroom budget conversation. Omdia's latest worldwide market study findings does exactly that. The research firm has raised its 2026 global semiconductor revenue forecast to 94.1 percent year-over-year growth, an increase driven almost entirely by memory pricing tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure. For technology executives, the number itself matters less than what sits underneath it. Applied-AI demand has now outrun the industry's capacity to produce and package the chips it needs, and Omdia expects that imbalance to persist through early 2027. The Semiconductor Forecast Revision Memory integrated circuits, DRAM and NAND combined, are now projected to account for more than 50 percent of total semiconductor revenue in 2026. That threshold has rarely been crossed in the industry's history. It marks a structural shift in where chip economics get decided. Logic used to set the pace of the industr...