The best year the computer market had in the last 9 years was 2014, when sales were well above half a billion dollars worldwide—and 230.1 million of those sales were of tablets such as the Apple iPad.

The whole market has been shrinking since then; for the most part, everyone who needs a computer has one. But that goes double for tablets. Since that high, sales have gone down to 150.3 million units last year (a 35 percent drop since 2014). Projections indicate the number dropping to 134.1 million tablets to ship in 2022.

That's still better than how desktops are doing. They have been on the decline even longer, going back to 2010's sale of 157 million units worldwide; sales have dropped 40 percent since then. The forecast for 2022 is that only 84.5 million desktops will sell.

The bright spot in all of this is laptops. They've also dwindled in market share since a high of 209 million units in 2011, to 162.3 million in 2018. But that's just a 22 percent loss. And the forecast for laptops is that sales will actually go up in 2022—only by 2.7 million units, but growth is growth.

Part of the problem here is revenue. Money-making is dropping for PC sales, naturally. In large part that may be because laptop prices are dropping all the time. They've gone down 65 percent since 2005.

The source data on this is from IDC (tabulated by our partners at Statista); it specifically lumps tablets together with detachable tablets, which we'd call a hybrid laptop. So even with that boost, laptops rule.