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Comment by pslam | Hacker News Reader

> 10/20 years later x86 is everywhere from the Macs to high end servers to lowliest tablets. The latest Atoms are actually very good.

10/20 years later, ARM represents the vast majority of both volume and profit in home personal computing. x86 is only "winning" if you define a very small category to compare against ARM.

> ARM meanwhile dominates the lowest end, but no one really makes money out of it. I think Intel was wise to avoid.

Edit: Meanwhile the "PC" category became largely irrelevant. That's what Intel missed.

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> Edit: Meanwhile the "PC" category became largely irrelevant. That's what Intel missed

That's a ridiculous claim. 2015 shipments of 288.7 million units (Gartner) may be down but they're still huge: that's 791,000 per day. And sales of Windows tablets and 2-in-1s are growing very rapidly.

Are tablet sales "largely irrelevant" because they're lower than PC sales (206.8 million, says IDC), and even if you include tablet PCs running Windows, declining even faster? https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40990116

Apple did not become the world's most profitable company selling macs, they became it selling arm based devices.

That's the market Intel missed.

There are roughly 4x as many iOS, Android (and runners-up) sales and growing. The graphs continue to trend in that direction. IDC is infamous for continuing to make useless comparisons which show PC sales to be better than they are. Possibly (if cynically) it's because that's who still pays for the research.

PC sales, even as narrowly defined by IDC, are now a small minority of total personal computing volume and profit. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone

Missed point error: they are different products.

Regardless of people buying smartphones and owning multiple devices, PCs are still selling well. In fact, they are selling in greater volumes than in most previous years.

Smartphones also benefit from their high junkability factor. A decent PC now has a useful life of around 5 years, so sales should be half what they were when the average life was 2.5 years.

Smartphone sales will also halve when they last 3 years instead of 18 months.

> PC sales, even as narrowly defined by IDC

IDC's PC numbers are artificially depressed because it doesn't include tablets and 2-in-1s. So when Microsoft sells a Surface Pro 3, IDC doesn't count that as a PC.

ARM is more than tablets. 15 billion chips shipped in 2015. Windows tablets have a ways to catch up.