How many pcs in the world

Among pundits and analysts, this number is often treated as authoritative and precise. It is not. It is, rather, an aspirational bit of rhetoric, called forth when Microsoft's senior management wants to emphasize the sheer size of the Windows customer base to motivate its workforce or rev up its partners. Satya Nadella's invocation at a Windows 10 event in January is a perfect example of the genre:. The fact that there are 1. It's a responsibility that none of us at Microsoft take lightly.

I believe that 1. Here, let me show you. Microsoft executives have, unsurprisingly, focused mostly on the growth of its Windows 10 installed base, reporting steady growth over the past five years. The company can be extremely confident about that metric, thanks to the update and telemetry components built into every copy of Windows As my colleague Mary Jo Foley notes regularly, Microsoft's "monthly active devices" metric counts devices that have been in contact with Microsoft's servers in the past 28 days.

See also: Windows 10 telemetry secrets: Where, when, and why Microsoft collects your data. These statements are also material representations from a publicly traded company, so they're vetted by lawyers and likely to be accurate. Making a material misrepresentation about the performance of a core business unit is the sort of thing that brings down the wrath of regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As of September 24, , Microsoft officials said that more than million active devices were running Windows That figure includes million Xbox One consoles, an insignificant number of HoloLens and Surface Hub devices, and a rapidly shrinking population of Windows Phones. After making those adjustments, let's call it million Windows 10 PCs.

That number has been increasing by about million every six months, and usage statistics I've reviewed show that the pace is ticking up slightly as the Windows 7 deadline nears. Given those trends, it's reasonable to project that the number of active Windows 10 devices will be over a billion by the end of the first calendar quarter of But how does that number compare to the current Windows installed base?

After reviewing all the available evidence, I'm convinced that the current installed base of Windows PCs as we head into is down significantly since its peak and is probably close to 1. A decade ago, when the PC era was in full swing, Microsoft executives regularly shared the company's estimates of how many Windows PCs were in use worldwide. For example, then-CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts in mid that the Windows installed base was approaching 1 billion and that the company expected to cross that threshold by mid The reported number of Windows users went up to 1.

Five years later, that public number has not gone up, and executives rarely mention it. In short, if you're looking for the highwater mark in the PC era, is a pretty good place to zero in. Every bit of available data since that time says the Windows installed base is declining, although probably not as steeply as it grew in its heyday. One obvious deduction from that number is the population of roughly 70 million Windows Phones, almost all of which have long since been retired or replaced.

Businesses are mostly in PC replacement mode, often using hardware upgrades as an excuse to migrate PCs to a new operating system. One of the biggest replacement cycles in enterprise PCs in recent memory is happening now, as companies and government institutions migrate their workers from older Windows versions mostly Windows 7 to Windows Some old machines are being retired and are not being replaced, especially in the consumer space.

Enthusiasts who used to have multiple PCs now have only one or two. In consumer households, smartphones and tablets are handling the majority of computing tasks these days.

How do you measure the shrinkage in the PC population? One way is to look at PC sales based on the average useful life of the current population. Seven years later, at the end of , Gartner's estimates of PC shipments for the trailing four quarters total less than million for the year. Allowing for some of those old PCs to still be at work, that's a gap of about 75 million PCs dropping out of the installed base. The numbers are similar for a year earlier: In the PC industry shipped million PCs; seven years later, in , the total was below million.

In the five years since Microsoft hit its high of 1. This statistic is not included in your account. Skip to main content Try our corporate solution for free! Single Accounts Corporate Solutions Universities.

Premium statistics. Read more. This statistic shows the installed base of personal computers worldwide from to In , there were approximately 1. You need a Single Account for unlimited access. Full access to 1m statistics Incl. Single Account. View for free. Show source. Show detailed source information?

Register for free Already a member? Log in. More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic. Hardware Computer penetration rate among households worldwide Software Market share held by PC operating systems in the U. Hardware Access to a computer in households worldwide Hardware U. Thomas Alsop. Research expert covering the global hardware industry. Profit from additional features with an Employee Account.

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