Gartner has today announced that PC sales are set to fall across 2009 by 11.9% (per cent) to around 257 million units. The company has said that this is going to be “the sharpest decline in history”.

According to Gartner, the PC industry is facing extraordinary conditions due to the economic downturn. When it seemed as if PC and notebook sales were increasing rapidly in 2008, we are beginning to see how the credit crunch is affecting the PC industry.

However, Gartner have also said that they are expecting an increase in the sales of laptops and notebook – more specifically the new mini-laptops or netbooks. 

So we’ll have to see what happens to sales over the course of this year, but it looks like many brands could be in trouble. I would like to hope that the rush of new technology might help ease the pain of the economic downturn on computing, but we’ll have to see what knock-on effect the downturn has this year.