Читать книгу Windows 10 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen, Woody Leonhard - Страница 20

Generally, devices with screens smaller than 9 inches ran the other kind of Windows, known as Windows 10 Mobile. Yes, there were devices larger than 9 inches that used to run Windows 10 Mobile and 8-inch devices with the “real” Windows 10. The general argument went like this: If you don’t need to use the traditional Windows 7–style desktop, why pay for it? Windows 10 centers on the mouse-friendly desktop. Windows 10 Mobile sticks to the tiled world and is much more finger-friendly.

This book talks about Windows 10, not Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft gave up and sold its Nokia business in May 2016. Also, the company stopped fixing bugs and providing updates for Windows 10 Mobile in December 2019. Today, no one sells smartphones or tablets with Windows 10 Mobile, and the platform is dead.

FIGURE 1-3: The worldwide market share of desktop operating systems — April 2019 – April 2020.

If you look at the bigger picture, including tablets and smartphones, the numbers change dramatically. As of April 2020, StatCounter says that 39.13 percent of all devices on the Internet use Android, while 33.1 percent use Windows. Back in July 2015, Andreesen Horowitz reported that the number of iOS devices (iPhones, iPads) sold per month zoomed ahead of the number of Windows PCs. Mobile operating systems are swallowing the world — and the trend has been in mobile’s favor, not Windows. The number of smartphones sold every year exceeded the number of PCs sold in 2011, and the curve has gone steeply in favor of mobile ever since. The number of PCs sold every year peaked in 2014 and has been declining steadily ever since. According to Statista, at the end of 2019, 60 percent of search engine visits in the United States were made from mobile devices. In other countries such as those in Asia, mobile is even more significant because people learn how to access the Internet on mobile devices and not on PCs.

Windows was once the king of the computing hill. Not so anymore. This is good news for you — the Windows customer. Today, Microsoft is branching out to make software for smartphones and tablets of all stripes, and Windows 10 itself works better with whatever tablets and hybrid devices you might use. It’s a brave new Windows world.