More companies price gouge as we get closer to the point when they will be unable to blame higher interest rates and inflation

Oh good. Yet another thing that’s going to cost more

Luckily this doesn’t affect me, since I bought mine about 1.5 years ago and I’m still completely happy with it. I don’t need to upgrade.

I think the industry as a whole is vastly underestimating the decline they are going to see here.

Look, here’s the facts, the way I see it: cell phones are quickly replacing home computers. We, as enthusiasts, probably make up less than 10% of the computer buying public (I don’t have actual numbers, by all means if you do, correct me). For everyone else though, like I can’t count the amount of laptops I’ve seen gathering big clumps of dust in peoples closets the past few years. Even people like my parents, they mostly use phones and iPads, they have a computer but it’s horribly out of date and isn’t getting replaced.

For enthusiasts like myself, even I swear I’m done after my overhaul last year. I haven’t even looked at a flyer this year. For <60% of the cost of a decent video card, a video card alone, I can game in 4k on a PlayStation, with no hiccups. Even if the PlayStation spontaneously combusts, I can replace the whole thing for less than the cost of some ram, a power supply and a processor. Sure I can’t mod, and the experience isn’t as good for stuff like first person shooters, but oh boy for the thousands of dollars in difference, I can make do. It’s nuts, you can’t keep up with PC upgrades fast enough anymore, and I’m done with it (for the foreseeable future). Doesn’t help when the industry keeps shipping horribly optimized games either, and then half the time they don’t do anything about it. Which means you need top tier hardware to offset that.

Stuff like ram and processors, will always have a market. But I’m not sure it’s a PC market anymore, which I personally believe is at the beginning of its end. There’s no way this is the bottom, Mr Analyst.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This is according to analyst Gartner’s figures, but other analysts have a different view of proceedings: IDC reckons this was the eighth straight quarter of “sales-out” shrinkage - meaning sales to retailers and distributors - and Canalys estimates the market actually grew three percent.

We’ve chosen on this occasion to go down the middle and mostly focus on the data emitted by number crunchers at Gartner, which calculates that some 63.37 million PCs were shipped in the three months.

“The PC market has hit the bottom of its decline after significant adjustment," said Mikako Kitagawa, director analyst at Gartner.

However, this situation will likely change due to the anticipated component price hike in 2024, as well as geopolitical and economic uncertainties."

Over at IDC, the analyst estimates that PC shipments were down 2.7 percent to 67.1 million, and also said the market has “bottomed out.”

Things certainly seem to be improving but those heady days of the pandemic, when the total available market swelled to 350 million in 2021, seem like a long time ago.

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