In today’s very very long blog post (more than 2,400 words!) about end-of-support options for Windows 10 PCs, Microsoft tried to bury an unpleasant statistic. That data point is tossed off casually in the opening paragraph, as Microsoft executive VP and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi says, “Today, Windows is the most widely used operating system, powering over a billion monthly active devices…” Sounds pretty good, right?
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Well, yes, until you realize that the last time Microsoft bragged about the number of monthly active Windows devices was more than three years ago. In its 2022 annual report, published in January 2022, the company boasted: “There are now more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or Windows 11.” And that number was up from 1.3 billion just one year earlier.
Make no mistake about it: When a top Microsoft executive publishes a number like that, it’s not some guesstimate; it’s considered material information, the sort of data that moves markets and makes the stock price rise or fall. As a result, those numbers are reviewed carefully by the legal department. If the number was still 1.4 billion or even 1.3 billion, that blog post would have said so.
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I don’t need ChatGPT to tell me that 1.4 billion in January 2022 minus 1 billion in June 2025 means that 400 million Windows PCs have disappeared in the past three and a half years. That’s more than one-quarter of the installed base just … gone.
My takeaway? Windows has indeed lost a big chunk of its installed base in the past three years as consumers retired old PCs and switched to mobile devices or tablets instead of replacing those clunky desktops and laptops. Families that might have had two or three PCs are now sharing one. Back in 2019, I was already seeing signs that the PC market was shrinking ahead of the last big end-of-support milestone.
[T]he PC market is more focused on business and government today than ever before, especially with large organizations scurrying to replace old devices running Windows 7 before the end-of-support date that’s now officially less than a year away. [Lenovo, HP, and Dell] have massive armies of salespeople who can write commercial contracts that cover hundreds of thousands or millions of seats at a time.
Meanwhile, the consumer market for PCs has all but vanished, with the exception of two groups: gamers and high-income professionals that still need the unique capabilities that a PC or Mac provides.
[D]on’t be surprised if corporate demand helps make 2019 one last year of flat PC sales before those numbers head south again..
That was a solid prediction – until the global pandemic happened and the market for PCs and Macs suddenly became relevant again, shifting into overdrive for a couple of extra years.
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In a prescient ZDNET post in January 2022, Steve Ranger noted: “The PC is back again. But for how long?”
By 2023 vendors will have sold an unexpected extra 130 million PCs above and beyond what they would have been expected a couple of years ago. And if it wasn’t for the supply chain issues from which the whole tech industry has been suffering, PC makers would have probably sold even more.
As it turns out, that was almost certainly the peak of the PC era.
One thought I had while I was sifting through more than a decade of Microsoft’s official numbers is that we still have no idea what the replacement rate is for PCs. If the PC market were static, consumers and businesses would have been retiring one PC for every new one that’s been sold in the past decade. But that’s not how things work in a world where mobile devices are ubiquitous and PCs and Macs are increasingly unnecessary for everyday tasks.
Also: This premium Lenovo Chromebook made me forget about my MacBook and Windows PC
Here’s what I wrote in 2019:
Microsoft routinely refers to a worldwide population of about 1.5 billion PCs. But the company has been repeating that number for at least six years [from 2013 through 2018]. … If I had to place my bet, I would guess that the retirement rate has been far in excess of the replacement rate in recent years and the total population of PCs has shrunk by a few hundred million from that 1.5 billion peak.
The once-in-a-century events of 2020 interrupted that downward trend, but there’s every reason to believe that the global market for Windows PCs has resumed its decline in the post-pandemic era. The same trend is true for sales of Apple’s Mac product line, which were flat from 2014 through 2019 and soared in the pandemic years. Mac sales peaked at more than $40 billion in 2022, and have since fallen off by roughly 27%.
Microsoft has worked deliberately in recent years to diversify its business. Today, the Xbox division brings in nearly as much revenue as Windows does, and both of those segments represent a fraction of what the company collects from Azure and Microsoft 365 enterprise licensing.
Also: How you can get Microsoft 365 (formerly Office) for free – 3 easy ways
When the Windows 10 end-of-support date arrives on Oct. 14, 2025, what impact will it have on these trends? Microsoft hopes it will spur a wave of PC replacement sales. It’s just as likely, though, that consumers will decide they really don’t need a new PC after all. And maybe by this time next year, the number of “monthly active Windows devices” will be back under the billion mark.
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Source: Robotics - zdnet.com
