Re: Falling Windows Market Share

On Tue, 7/1/2025 8:56 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:19:23 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

As recently as 3 years ago, Microsoft trumpeted an installed base of
1.4 billion Windows PCs; but the best it can say today is “over a
billion”.

 
Microsoft has revised the blog post in question to restore the 1.4
billion number
<https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-seemingly-lost-400-million-users-in-the-past-three-years-official-microsoft-statements-show-hints-of-a-shrinking-user-base>.
 
Still, though, the idea that users might be jumping ship to go to
Apple’s Macintosh isn’t borne out by Apple’s figures, either.
 

We know how price-sensitive the majority of the market
is, and especially... this week. During a normal time,
you might be tempted to do something different.

Apple is making something, using one of their phone processors,
which represents an effort to compete. Not that I would buy
such a contraption.

Tomshardware had a "funny" case of a Reddit user, who spent
$20,000 on a THreadRipper (on one of those $1100 motherboards),
and after a BIOS flash update, can't get it to work properly.

Generally, I buy the minimal core components on an expensive build,
just to prove in the thing and reduce my risk if the thing
catches fire or something :-) One person on the Reddit thread
mentioned the right approach. If you're building an ECC system
on AMD, you buy a single 8GB stick of *non-ECC* memory, and
that's to work around BIOS bugs and make forward progress.
Similarly, you pick up a junky video card (making sure it actually
works), and use that for bringup. And that's to prove that spending
big bucks on a couple nice video cards, is not a mistake if the
core system won't work.

   Paul