Computer sales in the pre-Christmas season (starting with the Thanksgiving-weekend) are below expectations. This trend is nothing new, since 2000 this is the main story of tech news agencies before the holidays. New about this whining is that the notebooks no longer get the blame. Even without having hard facts such as sale figures, this is a very foreseeable development. For average consumers, computing power no longer justifies replacing the current hardware. The focus has shifted towards energy consumption, noise and other secondary selling points, fields where notebooks have been historically strong. But this year, something changed. Starting with game-consoles and DVD-players, gadgets took over the living-rooms. This has been watched with envy by the IT industry and they demanded their share of it. So the “personal entertainment centre” was put together (in great haste) and advertised as the ultimate electronic device for your living-room. This experiment failed. The devices lacked usability, where loud and the issue of how to get content onto (or out of them) was not addressed. As a result, the gadgets not only kept their market share but by broadening their appeal with producing slim streaming boxes, further lowered the sale rate of classical computers. To sum things up, it has been a bad year for the boxes under your table, but it could have been worse. The key areas are still not lost, such as gamers (you simply can not put a high-end graphic-card with an high-end processor and an ultra-fast monitor into a notebook) or businesses. The next enemies are at the gates though: thin clients as a replacement for your day-to-day work (text, e-mail, internet). Let’s see, what next Christmas will bring!