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400 million Windows PCs vanished in 3 years. Where did they all go?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanished-in-3-years-where-did-they-all-go/
11•breve•5h ago

Comments

kacesensitive•5h ago
I'm just done with Windows after Nixon said Windows 10 would be the last OS and they'd just iterate on it then broke that promise soon after.
p_ing•5h ago
You weren't done when Gates said 640k was all you'd ever need?

Neither myth will ever disappear.

kacesensitive•4h ago
Wasn't alive then haha
mathfailure•5h ago
That article is a speculation, the number 400 millions was taken out of the article author's ass.
defrost•5h ago
The author asserts the number comes from official Microsoft user base size statements three years apart.

The figure derived from differencing two other numbers may or may not be correct but it has a non anal origin.

bb88•4h ago
I moved from Linux and MS to Mac this year. I didn't know if I'd like it, but the fact is that battery life always sucked on linux and running things like fusion 360 always felt like a workaround.

I used Jeff Geerling's ansible scripts, and now I have all of the development tools, fusion 360, and xtool creative suite through it and homebrew. I still don't like the fact that apple forces you to pay the memory and storage tax, but OTOH windows has been broken for a few years -- and forcing me to upgrade hardware from a perfectly serviceable Dell XPS 15 from 7 years ago to Windows 11 sealed it for me.

I thought I was going to dread the experience but it was fine. The only thing I hate is the stupidity of the command/ctrl behavior that's different than windows/linux. But I fixed that with a mechanical keyboard running VIA.

yjftsjthsd-h•2h ago
> The only thing I hate is the stupidity of the command/ctrl behavior that's different than windows/linux. But I fixed that with a mechanical keyboard running VIA.

Amusingly, that's probably my favorite thing on Darwin! It fixes annoying conflicts like ctrl-c meaning copy except in a terminal where it means (approximately) kill the running process; now ctrl-c means kill, and cmd-c always means copy. Similarly, web browsers can have terminals that I don't accidentally close because ctrl-w only means delete-word, not close tab. It's good enough that I've passingly toyed with porting it to the FOSS-unix ecosystem, but I don't think it's practical.

k310•2h ago
Keys are easy enough to remap. I got an MX keys keyboard because, unless something changed yesterday, Apple believes that only laptop users deserve a lighted keyboard. I mapped the ever-useless caps lock key to "option", which is less destructive.
cadamsdotcom•4h ago
Big up Valve for giving the world Proton, great to see what happens when people have an alternative.

Even if it’s actually less than 400 million, everything helps.

benoau•3h ago
And SteamOS. SteamOS showed everyone that low-power processors could be surprisingly competent, with perfect hibernation and sleep, without Windows.
Stealthisbook•1h ago
The quoted number is awfully specific. Monthly active devices? Why not licenses since that's what they are theoretically in the business of selling? Active devices would be relevant to their ad revenue, so I'd be interested to know what's the context for the statistic and what they're actually tracking. Are enterprise and other installs that block ad telemetry included?
theyknowitsxmas•14m ago
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

Okay zdnet is getting piholed for AI generated hogwash

Small Language Models Are the Future of Agentic AI

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02153
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I write type-safe generic data structures in C

https://danielchasehooper.com/posts/typechecked-generic-c-data-structures/
268•todsacerdoti•13h ago•99 comments

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https://blog.jxmo.io/p/there-are-no-new-ideas-in-ai-only
382•bilsbie•15h ago•189 comments

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https://www.philschmid.de/context-engineering
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https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/genetic-code-enables-zebrafish-to-mend-damaged-organs
15•bookofjoe•2d ago•0 comments

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https://github.com/nimtable/nimtable
12•Sheldon_fun•2h ago•5 comments

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143•denysvitali•11h ago•22 comments

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83•lifty•2d ago•12 comments

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https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/hooks
167•ramoz•6h ago•52 comments

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https://www.searchenginejournal.com/deepseek-app-faces-ban-in-germany-for-illegal-transfer-of-user-data/550172/
37•nsoonhui•2h ago•4 comments

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https://jsgroth.dev/blog/posts/dkc2-open-bus/
213•colejohnson66•15h ago•52 comments

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https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/wifi-motion
497•bearsyankees•11h ago•327 comments

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191•cfcfcf•6h ago•50 comments

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https://clownacy.wordpress.com/2025/05/24/the-original-lzexe-a-k-a-kosinski-compressor-source-code-has-been-released/
80•elvis70•11h ago•4 comments

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https://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/end-of-an-era.html
116•marcusestes•11h ago•31 comments

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https://proton.me/blog/apple-lawsuit
289•moose44•12h ago•317 comments

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https://tucson-josh.com/posts/rust-clap-cli/
67•rajman187•4h ago•55 comments

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378•david927•1d ago•1176 comments

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https://vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p1919-wang.pdf
33•matt_d•7h ago•3 comments

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https://spectrum.ieee.org/dsp-pioneer-jim-boddie
33•jnord•8h ago•0 comments

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234•rpastuszak•19h ago•81 comments

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84•naves•12h ago•71 comments

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32•elijahwright_•8h ago•1 comments

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5•zdw•2d ago•3 comments

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44•blitzpoet•3h ago•20 comments

Entropy of a Mixture

https://cgad.ski/blog/entropy-of-a-mixture.html
40•cgadski•9h ago•3 comments

So you want to serialize some DER?

https://alexgaynor.net/2025/jun/20/serialize-some-der/
46•lukastyrychtr•3d ago•8 comments

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92•skeptrune•5h ago•43 comments

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https://github.com/PlutoLang/Pluto
20•90s_dev•5h ago•6 comments

Publishing Pepys

https://literaryreview.co.uk/publishing-pepys
6•pepys•2d ago•1 comments