I can’t think of any major, consumer-friendly reason? Right now, the PC market feels a bit stagnant.
Among my friends in their 20s, most of them want to build a PC. It could be the case that my generation didn't experience the growth and the decline of the PC market and we don't appreciate the value of laptops yet. The hype for building a custom PC certainly exists.
But from a consumer's standpoint, I also think laptops win in most cases.
Correction: Thanks to the reply, I noticed that "PC Market" statistics included both Laptops and Desktop PCs. I am leaving this post as is, as it represents my ideas on why there is still a -possibly growing?- interest for desktop PCs.
The growth in the PC market had nothing to do with the consumer market.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/pc-market-appears-to...
Gartner reports that the growth was driven by increased business sales and that consumer shipments declined. IDC similarly pointed to the "business-driven refresh cycle" as a reason for the increase. This mirrors Microsoft's financial reporting; the software giant distinguishes between business and consumer sales of Windows and Office, and the general pattern over the last few quarters is that business sales have been robust even as consumer demand continues to soften. Enterprises are migrating to Windows 10, and they're buying new hardware to do so.
My T470P with an i7-7700HQ/32GB RAM/nvme m.2 handles all the programming I realistically need to do (I realised this when I had W10 running in a VM (8Gb/2 CPU), 3 vagrant instances and intellij open and still had 12GB of RAM free.
When I bought the laptop the plan was to build a Ryzen desktop pretty much immediately afterwards but here I am a year later deferring that till next year and the Zen2 architecture and my incentive to build a desktop has gone out the window, the Thinkpad runs a 27" 4K display just fine and for programming thats all I need it to do when I don't feel like working on the sofa.
So yes I can see ML and Gaming been a driver but since I don't do the former and rarely have the time for the latter I'm in the strange position of having a laptop be my primary computer for the first time since I started using PC's in 1987.
Hell the only game I play anymore on PC is Chess everything else the Xbox One is just fine.
So I broke down and got a new laptop with an i7 8650U, and it is disturbing how much faster it is, considering the base frequency seems to be significantly lower (1.9). I am wondering whether there is some now-ubiquitous function, perhaps relating to encryption that is accelerated on newer processors. Single threaded benchmarks only indicate it should be 2x as fast, but there is far more of a difference than that. Without identifying what the improvement is, I have the nagging doubt I should've identified a software problem on my old computer. I did try Linux on it, and that was not stunningly fast either.
So I would be happy with my new PC, except that I'm wary I'm being flim-flammed with software that makes old hardware run like crap, and the performance is an illusion. But hey, maybe the hardware has improved in 7 years. I remember when that was an eternity.
Gartner describes the data[1] as "Data includes desk-based PCs, notebook PCs and ultramobile premiums (such as Microsoft Surface), but not Chromebooks or iPads."
But is a 8th gen i3 significantly lower price than the 7th gen i5 when it came out? Because using your logic, that would be what would matter here.
If it's not, then it may be due to the availability of Ryzen CPUs, too, which are cheaper for more cores.
Other players I play with online are always talking about upgrades and saving up for a complete new system with all the latest hardware.
So I think fortnite and PUBG have definitely driven some growth in Gaming PC sales/hardware sales. Also the popularity of youtubers and streamers are driving kids and teens to ask for gaming PCs too.
Now that PUBG is on Xbox there is a new influx of players who started playing it on console but wanted to move over to the PC version.
Shooters on PC are much better than playing on a console, plus you usually get the features, updates and new maps first. But the feel of playing with a mouse and keyboard is way better on PC. Console ones are fun but I much prefer playing on a PC.