From a consumer perspective, it's unclear why a typical person needs a pc or laptop. For video content, a Chromecast is easier than fiddling with plugs and almost as cheap as an HDMI cable. A console provides a vastly superior gaming experience to a similarly priced laptop and almost no one needs to write a dissertation. And if you need to type at home for some reason, a $120 chromebook will do the job just fine--that may be a "laptop", but it's one that's worse than irrelevant to Microsoft.

And smartphones are better than PC in all sorts of ways. They can always be with you, they can function as a camera and video recorder directly, they aren't a box into which you need to figure out how to get your content into. They take up less space, and can easily be customized with cases for style and self expression.

Home computers started as a niche interest, and they'll return to that.