PC sales plunge, Microsoft and Windows 8 blamed

1) The last generation of computers that people already own (Intel i3/5/7 with Windows 7) is actually pretty damn good and covers most requirements perfectly well. In fact my 5 year old Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz ThinkPad T61 with a Samsung 840 Pro SSD is really fast to the point I have no plans to upgrade any time soon. I see people hanging on to these sorts of PCs now because they are the first generation to work pretty flawlessly, ever. People hang on to stuff that works and I don't blame them for doing that. Businesses do the same and to be honest, with some heel dragging, they're good until Windows 7 EOL in 2020.

2) Windows 8 is just horrible. I've tried it several times at different points of time on different machines ranging from laptop to desktop to touchscreen desktop and the usability has just completely gone out of the window. It doesn't work on a laptop and doesn't work on a desktop in any adequate way. It physically hurts you if you have to use it on a touch screen desktop either through mouse hoop jumping or aching arms. New device paradigms are being pushed but they all feel awkward and a bit Heath Robinson. I do think they got Windows Phone pretty spot on but that experience doesn't scale up to larger devices well.

3) Consumers used to drive a big chunk of sales, but this has been relatively scuppered by other vendor's consumption devices such as tablets and smart phones.

Agreed re: most users not requiring a high end quad core CPU to browse the net, listen to music, use an email client, etc.

Those cores do come in handy with virtual machines, however. With hyper threading your quad core turns into 8 virtual cores, which can then be dedicated to, and shared amongst, VMs -- very handy as a Linux user needing to test various flavors of Windows without requiring separate physical machines.

SSDs everyone benefits from, novice or advanced user, a useful upgrade (short of storage space of course). RAM, better too much than too little, 8GB with Windows 8 is probably a safe baseline.

and Windows 8 intro screen is a bit baffling at first, a bit like Gnome 3's WTF do I do, is there something wrong intro screen.

Actually I think this is a very good point. I've always seen people replacing their Windows machines just because they are 'slow' or 'not working' which could probably easily be solved just by reinstalling Windows. Windows 7 is a lot harder to break in this respect compared to previous versions, so I guess people just don't see the need.

for you. I doubt that "compiles much faster" or "allows more programs open at a time" would be marketing slogans that sell zillions of PCs. 'Normal' users run a web browser, maybe an email program, and Wordpad (I am not even sure that is an exaggeration, nowadays)

Also, about the SSD: in my limited experience, the only thing it really speeds up is boot time (shutdown of my iMac now takes ages, relatively speaking). Launching programs probably doubles in speed, too, but it already was fast enough for me. If you are compiling C/C++ or launching a VM zillions of times a day the difference will be huge, too, but [see above]