What goes up...<p>> It would be easy to think PC sales dropped worldwide last year amid chip shortages, but that conventional thinking would be wrong. As it turns out, Canalys reports that PC shipments grew 15% year over year in 2021 and were up 27% over 2019, with a whopping 341 million units sold.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/12/canalys-worldwide-pc-shipments-soared-in-2021-to-341-million-units/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/12/canalys-worldwide-pc-shipm...</a>
Didn't everyone buy or build PCs during the lockdown portion of the pandemic? I'm thinking now that all that latent demand has been satisfied, PC sales are just going back to normal.
I've been thinking about building a new machine based on the latest hardware but prices are still high. If they let prices drop a little the demand might be there.
Over the years, I have definitely slowed the pace at which I build & upgrade my PC's for work and for home.<p>I can happily live with a couple-generation-old CPU because it performs good enough.<p>I can reluctantly live with a couple-generation-old GPU, because the new ones are priced prohibitively.
CPU and GPU gains have been pretty modest for over a decade. Unless you are facing hardware failure (or the infamous Windows 'rot') I doubt many people have a legitimate reason to upgrade machines on a routine basis as they once did.
Just adding another data point here, but for those who game on a PC, the GPU market was upside down for a while. It was cheaper to buy, say a Dell XPS, than build your own PC for a period of time.<p>Then prices plummeted, and all returned to normal. Not sure if it plays much of a factor, but it did for me when I was determining whether or not to buy or build.
Not surprising, in this environment you either have much more money or much less depending on which side of the wage gap you are on as inequality keeps growing, and yet nobody would buy a new computer that doesn't function better than the old ones.<p>That's what Apple did right with the M1 and M2 and the demand for them keeps growing. All the PC industry have is overheating components and Windows 11 with it's terrible user experience. Intel and AMD are battling over benchmarks with their 300W TDP processors when all the market wants is battery life. They completely lost the plot.