PC shipments to see sharpest-ever decline

[Rastalovich]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/02/financial/f103954S67.DTL

Financial factors ? Or no need for a new pc when it isn't that much greater than an older one ?

 

[Ham]

Mainstream the former. Enthusiast the latter.

News dosn't supprise me at all tbh.

 

[Rastalovich]

It's too bad we can't get a more definitive picture on the enthusiast side of things cos of all the component people that go into making a whole rig.

Then u got the 1 component upgrade factor.

It would be a slanted view of things to try and make a patched listing of the various bigger players in the component industry. But to our own experiences of seeing smaller component-retailers closing down, finding it the hardest to cope with the sways of sales, and the losses reported by the likes of nVidia - $147m for Q408, AMD - $1.4b, Intel (from what I can make from their Q408) show an income of $234m -90% on Q407 (-24% on the whole of 08 v 07), although they don't purely reflect component sales, they aren't exactly christmas party material.

 

[JN]

I think there's quite a number of factors involved:

* Economy - Obviously. People have less money to spend.

* Improvement in overall computer literacy - More people are knowledgable enough to build their own, or know someone they trust that can.

* Upgrades - Socket 775 and DDR2 has been around for quite some time now. If you want a faster PC it's most likely a case of just swapping a few components

* Cost of upgrading - Memory is normally the first thing people turn to and it's cheaper than chips.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Ive noticed a massive difference trying to get stock, and prices are pants to say the least thanks to the exchange rate