>The PC market is shrinking.

You have very good points but I'd say this is somewhat of a fallacy. If you look at graphs for phone shipments and PC shipments, they're both somewhat declining between 2015-2025 (I'm focusing on this time period to exclude the current temporary component shortages). However, this doesn't mean they're becoming less popular in either usage or platform spending like buying apps, games and subscriptions. How can this circle be squared you might ask? Just about everyone has a phone or a laptop today. They're typically not first-time buyers, they'll be replacing their systems. Even if the number of devices shipped are decreasing today, doesn't mean the market itself has shrunk. Even if for some reason, all laptops became e-waste from next year January 1st, you'd see several hundred million sales next year for the replacement device, because the market is there.

For those consoles, that's not the case. (src: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/analyst-game-console-shipments...) Look at how Switch is the majority of shipments most of the time, and there are years where traditional consoles sell only a few million copies. Contrast that to the personal computer or the phone market where the numbers are in the tens of millions or hundreds each year. It's just not comparable.

>But not in manufacturing it.

LLMs won't build you a frontier fab that's for sure, but the point is that you don't necessarily need the latest'n'greatest with diminishing returns. An RTX 5090 is like ten times faster than a GTX 980 released 12 years ago. It doesn't run games which are ten times better. Similarly, something like the Galaxy S26 is ~7 times faster than an S6 around that time. Is it seven times better to use? Of course not :P

So the conclusion is that the performance the architecture you need to reach isn't an ever-racing frontier, you can make a new product (and in this hypothetical case, a product focused on openness) without having SOTA performance.

For a case of an "alternate" product like this, just see the Switch - much slower than "normal" consoles, good form factor, portable, and fairly cheap to produce. No one cares that it doesn't do 4K when undocked.

Macs are gaining on PCs in laptop/desktop market share. Only a small minority of those who didn’t already use PCs before are newly getting into PCs with Windows or Linux. This was different when Windows was still the respectable default, but the times are changing. Most of the PC market is business/office laptops/desktops, not personal home machines, and Macs are gaining both in personal and business use.

The Switch is popular despite its lowish performance, because of its ergonomics and ease of use, which is correlated with it being a walled-garden product, just like that’s the case for smartphones.