I feel there are 2 reasons for the drop in; firstly (and obviously) the depression/recession/credit crunch is having an impact everywhere, secondly it is the price of PCs; I'm in the market for a new dual core PC at the minute but not even ebuyer have anything under about £250. Manufacturers keep upgrading models unnecessarily and trying to prop their prices up that way, while if they concentrated on dropping their prices they could sell more volume at a smaller profit and retain the overall level of profits. This is how supermarkets can do you a DVD player for about £10 and a digital tv recorder thing for £80.

Oh, if someone knows somewhere that's flogging dual core PCs for less then do let us know.

Pirate cos Paris like pieces of 8.

Tim#3

I was looking at an upgrade to my existing home computer and was astounded just at the sheer different choices of CPU (AMD X3, AMD X4, Intel i7, Intel Dual Core, Intel Centrino vPro etc...) and Motherboards (with their own various choices of chipset). Its simply too complicated now to choose what you are after (and would be a safe purchase to last for a couple of years).

Perhaps the rest of the world is doing what I'm doing and putting up with a slower machine (on XP) and then go for something when its settled down a bit.

This is the end-game of every research-based product - when its good enough, people stop paying more for better. My favorite example is the ski industry, the most recent to be hard hit are chemicals producing dyestuffs.

In the PC industry, the market was huge, and margins were always smaller - the concept, as usual, was to gain market share and profit in the end-game. They are trying - including by keeping the atom/netbook price up - to keep the prices high, but 2nd hand Duos and Quads are dropping in price, and soon self-assembly will become cheaper than of-the-shelf again.

I suggest you buy one 2nd hand on Ebay from someone switching to a laptop, or wait a few months for an assembled box at your price/quality.

So the conventional PC seems to be in a state of collapse and the only hardware that's shifting are those poxy boxes with Atoms inside. You can't run Fista or 7ervice Pack on one of those, so where is Steve going to get his sales from?