PC sales were at their peak when machines were outdated in 6 months and obsolete in 2 years. That era is completely dead. At this point there are likely literally billions of reasonably high performance machines out in the world. And I think also more people than ever have realized that 'building your own computer' is about as difficult as putting together a 10 piece lego toy, and you get exactly what you want, and you likely save a reasonable amount of money.
As a result, the last time I decided I still needed a Windows box but both my old DIY systems were down for various counts, I just bought a 17" Alienware laptop which worked, reduced the clutter, and is just fine. (And I'm not sure it cost more than I'd have ended up spending.)
Now Windows 10 is driving an upgrade cycle by arbitrarily dropping support for old stuff and shipping every 6 months. Microsoft will continue to squeeze until people leave the platform.
A modern cpu from the same price class as five years ago is twice as fast. NVMe storage is also many times faster than SATA, and five years ago hdd’s were commonplace anyway. I’m not even going to discuss graphics.
Windows 10’s hardware requirements are quite low: 1 ghz cpu, 2 gb ram, 20 gb hard drive. That’s 10 year old hardware. How much older do you expect them to support? Should it run on 20 year old hardware? To be fair 5 year old laptops might have driver compat issues on w10, but more likely the reason for the business uptick is just that pc’s only last so long before they need to be replaced, and for convenience of support they tend to replace in bulk.
Even 4 year old pc owners might find their systems to be partially supported: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-blocks-windows-10-cr...
Tablet sales have yanked though, and touch keyboards suck for writing anything longer than, say, this comment. (Actually, even this given the incidence of typos... Count them!)
If your job involves wound emails, you probably need a laptop.
The intersting dynamic is that people tend to spend more time mastering their phones (for instance installing printing apps, dropbox etc.) and don’t want to maintain another completely different device they’ll only use occasionaly.
This means people with old PCs won’t care much if it’s slow and clunky, as they won’t use it much. People without a PC yet might bail out completely and use their work computer when they have stuff that can only be done on PC.
(note: total PC shipments are 61 million, business users included, while iPad sales for 2017 quarters were a about 11 million. People turning to the iPad for “big screen” tasks is a big enough trend I think)
I assembled both, and they work quite well at their tasks. I would never want to work with a pre-built computer again.
The consumer market can still drop further though. Most people are fine using ipads, and probably even better off than with a laptop when all things are considered.