You carry around a 'big 4k monitor' with your notebook ?. You must have a very large bag to be able to carry all that around in ?.

I know that people took their NUCs and screens home.
I know that in many companies there wasn't much remote working stuff.
I didn't heard much about people being switched to mobile devices (at best see first point)

Yeah, Laptop marked was sold out. As was NUC-marked and for some time gaming screes with a lot of features did cost less then "office" screens.

An x86 tablet running Windows or Linux is more like a laptop PC without the keyboard and touchpad, but with a touchscreen.

I use external monitor, keyboard and mouse with all my laptops, except when I am traveling with one ... or I plug a laptop into my Hifi System, which I guess is an even bigger monitor.

I do that for the obvious reasons ... size chiefly and a mouse always works infinitely better than a trackpad or fingerpad. But then I sit at a computer desk rather than use my laptop at home on my lap .... I guess I am old fashioned that way ... ha ha ha.

Yes, I use an external monitor. Good laptop displays with a high refresh rate and G-Sync are prohibitively expensive. Smaller, lower quality laptop screens give me headaches that I don't get on high quality external monitors.

They absolutely do. The large majority of computers sold are laptops. Also some desktops have built-in displays (all-in-one units, like iMacs). For reference, here, which is for the UK, but is similar to world-wide stats, and contains this: "Worldwide, total laptop sales are expected to reach 171 million units in 2023, up from 166 million units in 2019. Desktop sales are expected to contract, from 88.4 million units in 2019, to 79.5 million units by 2023."

While I mainly use laptops these days, I use an external monitor as my main display mostly because I want to use a bigger display. I don't really use my laptop's keyboard either or touchpad, I have an external one on those as well.

And for work purposes, a bigger display is a must, really. For me at least.

True, but nothing stopping anyone (depending on size) placing it up to their ear and making skype/zoom/Telegram voice calls with it...

Anyway, back on topic: I always try to use an external monitor (which is a 27" FHD Matte TN screen with 3 input ports) whenever possible with all my laptops and desktop. As all the laptops have inferior 1366 or 1280 x 800 resolutions without discrete graphic, but rather good CPU's for their time. And basically use them just like desktops, as they have all been setup to disable the internal screen whenever they are booted up connected to said monitor. The desktop is the only one with a Dedicated GPU (1050Ti), that obviously won't be of much use without being connected to a monitor. And as dtgreene hinted, I actually own a few phones and tablets that allow for video out to an external screen.

I use three of them, both at work and at home.

No, and workspaces are great. Join the Linux club.

Technically, these are monitors/screens/displays with built-in computers... ;)

Technically, I'd call them laptops with external keyboards. ;) (And you don't use them on your lap. But tech-wise they're closer to laptops than normal desktops.)

It's hard to argue one way or another, specially when you start to factor thin clients/nucs, surface/X86 tablets and Raspberry pi's, wich may not be accounted as computers on most stat websites. And truth to be told, most of them are not used as general purpose computing devices, so it may be hard to draw a line on what is cnsidered a "personal computer".

In my personal case. disregarding the desktops wich must be connected to a screen for obvious reasons, have a laptop always connected to a TV and all portable devices connect regulary to external monitors.

Actually, because a trackpad is cumbersome to use, I try to avoid using a pointing device in the first place when working on a laptop, preferring lynx for browsing the internet and for games I prefer those that can be played keyboard-only.

Linux is really nice (and I use it exclusively), but Windows has recently gained this capability:
https://www.lifewire.com/use-linux-style-virtual-workspaces-in-windows-10-4101797

(Yes, we have Windows copying Linux here, rather than the other way around.)

Except for the lack of a battery.