Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
My new laptop came with Windows 11, but that’s gone now. Steamdeck must be helping with these figures too. Good work everyone.
M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.
The article says Mac sales are declining too.
Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore.
People ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore doesn’t explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don’t need it than Mac or Linux users.
Average people are also more likely to ditch their PCs than Linux users.
See the recent meme:
I just installed Mint and some games on 5 Thinkpad T420s my boss was going to throw out. Sunday’s LAN party was pretty fun.
Is this my future?
If you’re lucky
MAC sales peaked 10-11 years ago.
I could quite literally just get by on my phone these days. I only use the laptop for the larger screen and something to hold an extremely large capacity SD card, as for whatever reason samsung flip phones don’t have that anymore.
I think thats exactly it. A lot of the people begrudgingly have a PC. I bet most of those just use whatever the PC came with. Linux and Mac users are more likely to enjoy using a PC.
Linux users NEED their computer. You don’t put up with getting into Linux for fun except of you are a very special breed of geek.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202505
Both Linux and MacOS look fairly flat overall, with a few spikes for Mac. What did happen was iOS and especially Android went to the moon.
Most people had a PC for a bit of light office work, emails and storing pictures. All of that can be done on a phone and more besides. It’s not great that a handful of Silicon Valley techbros are holding everyone’s data to ransom, but that’s what the masses are doing.
I just got a cheap minipc to tinker with and it had windows 11. Not bad and unexpected.
First thing I did was wipe and install Ubuntu of course because that’s what I wanted.
I do like Mini PCs, but I kind of wish there was an easy way to get a solid GPU into it. There’s those weird docks but they’re far from standard, and it would be nice if the GPU had a similar form factor, so you could just stack them up like a MiniPC on top of it like an old hi-fi separates system.
Slap a storage box on it as well for some HDDs, baby you got a server going.
Your best bet is to shoot for one with an AMD Ryzen chip, as they have by-far the best iGPU available.
Getting a dedicated GPU into a mini PC is a pretty big ask, but the above will even do moderate gaming tasks. My laptop with a Ryzen iGPU plays Guild Wars 2 just fine, for example.
A self-built Mini-ITX box might also be up your alley, as those can take proper PCI-E graphics cards.