The End of Windows? Hardly (Premium)

In my book Windows Everywhere, I chart the rise and fall of Windows as a platform. But whether it’s through inertia or the failings of its would-be competitors, most people who need desktop productivity functionality today still use Windows. And so the question is whether that ever changes. Could Windows be overtaken by alternatives like the Mac, Linux, Chromebooks and/or tablets?

While anything is possible, the evidence to date suggests that this won't happen in the near term. Sure, the PC industry has experienced a post-pandemic period of decline, but so too have the smartphone and tablet markets. And there's nothing unique about the PC that makes it especially immune or susceptible to broader trends. The PC is just as necessary to its audience as those other device types are to theirs.

But looking at the most obvious competitors to the PC, there has been some movement in usage recently. Whether this is dramatic or not will depend on your perspective. For example, StatCounter reports that usage of Windows-based PCs in the desktop computer market was 75.21 percent in July 2022 and 69.52 percent in July 2023, a year-over-year (YOY) decline of 7.6 percent. But Mac usage has surged in the Apple Silicon era, jumping 29 percent, from 14.51 percent to 20.42 percent share, in this same time period. (Also-rans like ChromeOS and Linux barely factor, with roughly 3 percent usage share each and flat growth.)

That seems definitive. But annual market share (unit sales) tells a more nuanced story: the Mac accounted for 7.8 percent of all personal computers sold in 2021, the same figure it had obtained the year before. But it lost ground in 2022, finishing the year with just 7.2 percent market share. Apple fans, eager to cast their favorite company in a positive light, claimed that this slippage was explained by the fact that the first-generation M1 chipsets were so good that customers didn't need to upgrade again in 2022 when the M2 family arrived. I assume it's clear why that argument makes no sense at all and is easily discarded. But the point here is that 7, 8 percent share, whatever, isn't enough to dominate the personal computer market. (Remember that the Mac had 5 percent share when Steve Jobs returned to the company in the late 1990s.)

These two sets of metrics, seemingly contradictory, both tell their own story, their own version of the relative health and performance of these products. And there are other ways to look at this market. For example, Apple's transition of the Mac from Intel to Apple Silicon chipsets has been a brilliant and unadulterated success, while Microsoft's attempts to port Windows to similar Arm-based chipsets happened much more slowly, is far less technically successful (especially from an application performance perspective), and the resulting products sell so poorly they're not even a footnote.

So one can easily argue that Apple has done a better job, overall, in positioning the Mac for a future that is...