Is it a possibility to consider that people have PC's and don't need new ones?

I think the only solution would be for Microsoft to make all old versions of word only run on i7s.

I wonder if people would buy a PC that streams it's content to a bare bones wireless tablet.

you would get great performance and long lasting battery life around the house.

not surprising a lot of big companies, schools and goverments aren't upgrading their old, perfectly working, computers in these kinda economics..they don't even upgrade their software.. i still get Word 2003 documents from time to time..

No, not even remotely close.

You only get that impression from online forums where the people that do build their own PC's tend to hangout.

I think most people get laptops if they buy a PC of any kind anymore, and it is much more difficult and expensive to try and build your own one of those

So people are buying tablets but not pc's? Well that's disappointing, cause I find tablets pretty useless. They look cool and if I owned one I'd use it to play a game for 5min a day but there is no other need for it. Everything you can do on a tablet can be done more easily on a pc.

Pretty much.  The core market will always be there.  It's just that PC's are useful for... well practically everything.  So EVERYBODY was buying one, even for the most trivial of things such as email only.

Even without tablets, PC sales were likely to slow, as most people now have a PC and they won't need a new one for a good decade.

That's what the Wii U is. It gets 4 hours of battery life while tablets with much better displays get 8-10 hours. An always on, high bandwidth, low latency wireless connection is a bigger battery hog than a good SoC. Also the range of such a connection doesn't even cover a whole house.

I think A LOT of this has to do with the very poor reception of Windows 8. And what's worse is that ever since March (may have even started in Feb), MS seems to be forcing stores to only carry Windows 8 PCs/laptops. My wife needed a new laptop and all the stores in our area had were Windows 8 ones. Both of us hate it. It usable, but not very intuitive.

well pc tech has slowed down in advancement. No one is going to upgrade for a 30% increase.

I remember the days when you bought a pc and literally within months it was considered really old to tech that come out.