Zarathustra[H];1039788989 said:Saying that the economy has not impacted tablet/smartphone sales is a completely unverifiable statement to make, as no one knows what those sales would have looked like if the market had not crashed. Chances are very good they would have been even higher.
The downturn in PC sales is almost exclusively due to people and businesses making due with what they have in the face of income insecurity.
The problem with PC sales is that tablet and smartphone sales are doing extremely well, and like you've mentioned, could potentially have been doing even better.
It's not solely the economic downturn to blame here, just as it isn't only Win8. Even in regions where there has been little economic impact the sales have gone down, and whether Microsoft released an awesome version of Windows the sales still would have slumped. There's no doubt that they both impacted PC sales, but so has the current software landscape; why do you need to buy new hardware? You and I might, but what about the average user? Do they even need a new PC? Then there's also cannibalization. A lot of users don't even need a desktop or a laptop. At all. They can get by quite fine with just a tablet. Do they need a PC at all? And what about the price? Intel charges ~$200 for a mobile i5 (and laptops comprise >2/3s of all PCs sold). That's as much as a new Android tablet and for not much more you can get an iPad Mini. You get more "apps" and the display is going to be way better. Do you really need 500GB of storage? What if you've already bought into the Android/iOS ecosystem and have everything synchronized?
Blaming the economic downturn alone is as idiotic as blaming only Windows 8.