The need for "Modern PCs"

[dammy]

I will answer very quickly: people who buy a tablet already have a PC. Stop dot.

Those devices are complementary but, in the fields where they are interchangeable, tablets allow to do the same while moving.

That's exactly why the netbook market has died: people who bought a netbook, already had a PC. And that's why the notebooks are struggling too, reinventing themselves as lighter, more powerful and cool ultrabooks: people who bought a notebook because they already had a PC, moved to tablets, but people who still need a laptop because they can't do without, now buy a cheap $499 one or a more glamorous ultrabook.

PCs will never really die: there will always be the need for them, after all.

There are two groups of people that will insure desktops will remain viable market segment, gamers and business.  Business like desktops because management doesn't get a late evening call from employees stating they left their desktop in a bar or someone one a bus stole their desktop or they left their desktop in a cab.  Gamers will have desktops because there is just so much you can squeeze out of console systems vs the latest and greatest GPUs demanding games that have associated bragging rights on how many FPS they are getting out of their beast system.

[dammy]

And what about the hobbyist? I for one want a desktop, and certainly not a tablet.

I don't think there really are that many "hobbyist" out there that would be significant enough sales to keep desktop sales in the 1/3 of total market, which is the going rate that the business and gamers are currently purchasing desktops.  Back in the 1980s and maybe 1990s, sure.  Today, computer is simply a tool and while you do have OCers out there via for titles of who can out OC whom, it's not enough to maintain the current desktop sales rates.  Even more so that most folk's phones are more powerful then what desktops were ten or so years ago.  Now you may have a hardware hacker here and there that needs direct access to the desktop mobo for whatever reason, but it's not a significant number that would affect desktop sales.  Even more so when you have such fast data links for external hardware to talk to a given computer, be it desktop or smartphone.