Podcast - today's tech news headlines - PC sales down

LOS ANGELES -

When’s the last time you cranked open your desktop computer or laptop? If you’re like many of us, the answer is probably--a while ago.

A new study from researcher Gartner says PC sales continued their decline in the 4th quarter, shipping 75 million units, compared to 82 million in the year ago quarter.

This was after Microsoft released its new operating system upgrade, Windows 10, which had been expected to boost sales.

Sales for the top 4 PC manufacturers, Lenovo, HP, Dell and Asus were down, but Apple was up slightly, selling 5.6 million computers, mostly laptops, in the quarter, up from 5.5 million in the previous quarter.

Why are we spending less time on the computer? Because we have a miniature one in our pockets.

Sales of smartphones were expected to top 2 billion in 2015, but we’re not using them to do the traditional. A new study from researcher Deloitte says that 25% of us won’t make a single call in a week--yet 40% of us will check it within 5 minutes of waking up for the latest e-mail and social media status updates.

In keeping with the survey theme today, researcher Juniper says that Apple ended the year with 51.5% of smartwatch sales to sell 8.8 million units, to rival Android Wear’s 10% market share.

But don’t pull out the champagne just yet. Many analysts had predicted Apple to sell upwards of 20 million watches in its first year, suggesting that Apple has a long way to go to get this watch to--one day replace the PC?