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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.

This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support — so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version). Although macOS is a threat to Windows, especially with the launch of Apple Silicon, we cannot say that those 400 million users all went and bought a MacBook. That’s because, as far back as 2023, Mac sales have also been dropping, with Statista reporting the computer line, once holding more than 85% of the company revenue, now making up just 7.7%.

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[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 93 points 1 week ago

I think it's mainly because the entire PC market is shrinking. Most people use phones and tablets these days and those don't come with Windows.

[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 week ago

Gaming and corporate software are the last strongholds, but mobile gaming keeps growing and I see more and more people using tablets for office work. Especially when companies keep moving more of their core applications to the cloud with web/app interfaces.

[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I see that, too. Always makes me feel like a boomer (despite being in the wrong age group to be one), because I like my computer for the hundred and something keys which fit snuggly underneath all fingers, the separate keys for brackets and umlauts and numbers. And that I can open and operate like 3 programs next to each other while doing work. Somehow people younger than me(?) do it very differently.

(Plus I can install an operating system I really like on my computer.)

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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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