I realise that I'm on the outside looking in when it comes to computers but from my point of view it looks like pretty much the only thing that makes news is some new feature that "improves" the gaming experience.
That's why they're pushing AI so hard. There's little the OS can do to make you more productive, but AI can.
Games are the big money maker, and better GPUs seem to be produced mainly just to cater for these games. When did computers veer off course to become toys instead of tools to get a complex job done?
Most weren't used to do complex things, they were used to do relatively simple things and those have moved on to smartphones/tablets. More people are familiar with smartphones/tablets than PCs making it cheaper to train people.
And now that so much computing power can be done by a mobile phone what is the point in having laptops or desktops?
For the actual complicated tasks. Try doing anything actually productive on a smartphone or tablet like a complicated spreadsheet or CAD modelling (not just 3D modelling but data driven CAD modelling) or programming.
Mostly an issue of screenspace, window organisation options and input controls though. So the dream of plug in peripherals and turn your phone into a PC could solve that.
And if the stats are to be believed these devices are on the decline.
They are, if you look around it's likely your own experience will back up the stats. Just before and after we moved into a new millennium basically every household in the west had a desktop or laptop (often both or even multiple) . That slowly moved towards more and more laptops as they offered enough power and screen space and in most households not everyone likes sacrificing space to a whole computer setup.
Once smartphones got introduced both desktop and laptop sales took a hit and keep on doing so. It's not just that people don't want to spend the money / sacrifice the needed space for it - the youth has grown up with just a smartphone. There's literal millions who don't know how to use a mouse or keyboard or only because they were forced to do so in school.
Heck, Windows itself took an even bigger hit because Chromebooks are **heavily** used in schools. A lot of kids wouldn't know how to even use Windows.
Funnily enough we went from kids knowing better than their parents how to use a PC to now parents knowing better than kids how to use a PC.
Where does that leave Microsoft? No wonder their OS is such rubbish.
It leaves them as one of the most valuable companies in the world. They have their fingers in a lot of pies. They got office running on browsers, mobile and mac for example, Windows isn't their one and only golden goose.
No wonder they keep adding bells and whistles (aka Bloatware) to try to slow the downhill trend. They are running out of ideas to sell to the fanboys that hang on every "perceived" improvement. They are finding that creating a pure data miner that gathers saleable personal information is easier than providing a secure efficient means of doing work for the user.
Easy money. All Hail Micro$oft!
Enshittification - they reached the biggest possible market share they can (they can basically only shrink from here on). So they try different avenues for income with more spyware and ads. They're not really competing against anyone so the only thing they can do is extract more value out of every customer. This is why monopolies are bad.
We seem to have this problem in particular with software and services where companies get so big in the market they run out of customers to get so they resort to getting more out of every customer until it reaches the boiling point where everyone is sick of getting milked so hard that they'll settle for a lesser alternative at a lower cost. Funnily Windows alternatives are either higher cost (Hi Apple!) or free - Linux.
Betcha Linux will keep growing and once it reaches a certain size Microsoft throws in the towel and runs their own software stack on top of the Linux kernel effectively becoming a weird Linux distro that doesn't run typical Linux things (a lot like Android / Chrome OS are at the moment).
