400 million Windows PCs have disappeared: a massive extinction passed over in silence

Between 2022 and 2025, Microsoft lost track of hundreds of millions of machines. Similarly, The company itself admitted it in half-word: the active pc of PC under Windows rose from around 1.4 billion to just over a billion. Therefore, What happened? In addition, Are we witnessing the end of a cycle? Or to a radical redefinition of what it means to have a computer in 2025?

The Windows PC loses ground: Microsoft now has a park down 400 million devices

It is not an exaggeration or a wacky projection. In January 2022, Microsoft announced that more than 1.4 billion Windows 10 or Windows 11 terminals were actively used each month. A machine is considered to be “active” when it connects at least once in 28 days to the firm services. typically Windows Update, Microsoft 365 or Onedrive. It is therefore not a sales figure, but of real use, measured internally.

In 2025, communication changed tone. More official dashboard, more growth 400 million windows pcs have highlighted. The few public mentions now evoke “A little over a billion active devices”. Microsoft has therefore indeed adjusted this figure down, without drum or horn. We therefore speak of nearly 400 million PCs which are no longer counted as “active” – not because they have physically disappeared. but because they are no longer used, or at least more connected to Microsoft services.

This decline is not an anomaly, nor a bug, but a tilting. After the euphoria of massive renewal in full pandemic, a good part of the park was simply disconnected. Devices purchased for teleworking or school at home have finished in drawers. Others have 400 million windows pcs have never been reconfigured after resale or transfer.

And in the meantime, habits have evolved: more and more households are turning to other formats, sometimes more flexible, more compact, and above all less dependent on a bone as structuring as Windows. Tablets, smartphones, or even no fixed machine at all.

What this disconnection reveals above all is that Microsoft himself seems to have turned the page of the. PC as a central pillar of his model. Windows still exists, but it no longer dictates the strategy. The heart of growth is played out elsewhere: in the Azure cloud. in Microsoft 365 subscriptions, in AI with Copilot, and in a software ecosystem thought to live beyond the office. Even the evolution of Windows 11 – more sober, less customizable, less in depth – seems to confirm 400 million windows pcs have this refocusing.

The hemorrhage of 400 million machines does not panic anyone in Redmond. It is not an industrial accident, it is a moult. The Windows PC. as it has been known, goes out slowly – sometimes literally – while Microsoft is preparing for a more diffuse, less material future. A future where the operating system is no longer the hero, but a simple cog?

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