PC shipments drop to lowest back-to-school totals since 2008

It’s the tablets. Blame the tablets.

The PC market continues to fall spectacularly, seeing the sixth consecutive quarter of declining worldwide shipments as well as the lowest back-to-school quarter since 2008. Worldwide PC shipments dropped to 80.3 million units in the third quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, an 8.6 percent decrease from the same period last year.

While Lenovo, HP, and Dell managed to grow their respective shares, this was not enough to offset the losses seen by Acer, Asus, and the rest of the market: