It's retail, stupid
I've made this point before ad nauseam, but in Europe, PC manufacturers, distributors and retailers can't do retail. So ignoring the corporate market for the moment, they are getting what was coming to them.
Apple excepted, go into a shop to buy a computer and you'll be greeted by a jumble sale of indistinguishable flotsam, sold by a desultory clan of kids with fantastical advice. Model ranges are both hopelessly fragmented and underrepresented (there'll be ten models there, but not the one you want). The shit screens and keyboard layouts you saw five years ago on laptops are still there. The machines are still noisy. They still have infuriating layout quirks, too few ports, breakable DC jacks, and shiny screens. They are reliably ugly - especially the ones trying to stand out by not being a grey box.
Online, the experience is probably worse.
Not being in the market for an Apple, which exhibits only some of this incompetence (keyboards and ports), I literally can't find anything to buy. So I go home and buy some components to upgrade what I have.
It doesn't matter that people don't need PCs. I don't need a(nother) PC. I'm still trying, unsuccessfully, to buy one. People don't need new bicycles or cars or food mixers either. Those markets were saturated 30 years ago, but no-one's talking about the bottom falling out of them. A clue is that those things are designed, marketed and retailed properly.
This problem is self inflicted at the retail end of the market.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
