The whole admission was buried deep in a turgid 2,400-word blog post about extended support for Windows 10. Once the "over a billion" line was spotted, Microsoft scrambled to update it, insisting it wasn't a precise figure, but rather a vague nod to their “user base.”

Ed Bott, who’s been tracking Microsoft's PC numbers longer than most of its current staff have had email, points out that losing 400 million PCs is more than a rounding error. It’s more than one-quarter of the installed base, gone in just over three years. And there’s no sign they’re coming back.

The theory is that the post-pandemic spike in PC demand is now a memory. Between 2020 and 2022, people stocked up on desktops and laptops for remote work and homeschooling. Now, households are down to a single shared PC or none at all, opting instead for tablets, Chromebooks, or just phones. If Granny's Windows 7 laptop finally died, chances are it wasn’t replaced.

That’s a headache for the Grey Box Shifters, such as HP, Lenovo, and Dell, who increasingly rely on corporate bulk orders to keep the lights on. While business demand might still keep the PC market on life support, the consumer space has all but evaporated, except for gamers and affluent professionals who still require local horsepower.

Apple’s MacBook magic has worn off. Mac sales peaked in 2022 at more than $40 billion but have since slid 27 per cent, so much for the post-PC era 2.0.

Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall. These days, it rakes in far more from Azure and enterprise licensing than it does from flogging copies of Windows. The Xbox division alone now pulls in about the same revenue as the Windows group.

With support for Windows 10 ending on 14 October 2025, Microsoft hopes another PC refresh cycle might kick in. But if current trends hold, many punters will just ignore the deadline and muddle through without bothering to replace ageing machines. At this rate, the billion-device milestone might soon be another marketing line Microsoft quietly edits out.