MOUNTAIN of unsold retail PCs piling up in Blighty: Situation 'serious' A consumer PC bottleneck in the UK could result in some price cuts ahead of the Windows 10 launch - or so folk in the supply chain are telling us. Distributors are sitting on roughly 60 days of client stock - around twice the amount they typically carry - and all vendors, save for HP, contributed to the mess. “Inventory …
I don't know about x1 carbon, but you certainly can get ex-corpo stock of laptops (presumably also others) relatively cheap. How about 12.5'', i7, lenovo keyboard (old-school), 160 GB ssd, 8GB RAM, W7 pro 64 and IPS, all grade A1 (by my standards), all for £320? And about 4 hr battery life plus a _huge_ market for spares and accessories, most of them dirt-cheap or reasonable.
p.s. it takes some digging around, and most sellers, including vendors, often don't care to list the exact specs as they are, but it's doable.
never mind, off topic.
p.s. I saw good deals at gigarefurb (and they respond to queries v. promptly, and know what they talk about), although I got mine elsewhere, gumtree.
but if I were to replace a desktop, or a workstation, shit, I'd never buy a new one these days. Probably I'd not even bother building one myself, when you can get a decent 2n-hand machine for 100 - 200 quid, including Win7 / 10.
There are also many, many laptop that are fine. I bought a fully loaded Thinkpad x series years ago, for about 600 quid including the thinkbase - 2.5-3x lower price than new. The battery had only been charged 30 times, and there was at least a year's warranty left. It's still going strong, years on, although I now only get about an hour and a half out of the battery instead of six.
ebay and gumtree do carry the risk, but consider:
a) a seller's been on gumtree for over a year. Not a proof of innocence, but seriously reduces the risk, as the thieves usually operate very short-lived business model, I suppose, hit and disappear.
b) this particular thinkpad model, high and around 4 years ago was, apparently, replaced by corporations with something newer around end of 2014 / beginning of 2015 (I didn't hear it from the seller, but from various sources before), and it's been filtering to 2nd hand market since. I suppose I can look it up on lenovo site, even if it's out of warranty, but I can't imagine somebody taking a risk and inviting a stranger to their home to flog them a 320 quid worth of stolen, 4-year old laptop...
p.s. yes, I just realized I might just as well be the actual seller, "gently" steering the right clientele my way, quoting where you can find this or that... but then, I always find it silly when people say "I bought it on a well-know site you-know-where", so yes, ebay, and gumtree, and amazon, and google search engine.. that's the source of info.
I actually would have been happier to buy off some reasonably reputable seller on ebay or a refurbishment business, like the one I mentioned, because they do give some sort of guarantee, but neither had exactly what I wanted (ram, ssd, ips screen, and if they did, they were sourced from Germany and / or were grade B (which is fine, I suppose). In my case I was able to see the laptop, and for similar price I got better grade and somewhat better specs. Ironically, about 4 years ago we bought a family laptop, also lenovo (no particular preference there), for not much more, some £400. And it's still going strong. But I'm fed up with lugging it around on holiday. Plus, I got a panic atack when I found out the model I've just bought is the last one before lenovo switched to that f... chisel-style keyboard. I do a lot of typing and I hate this chisel shit.
@Buzzword
But after three years you'll still have spent around £700 (after you sell the old macbook) and I'll have spent just £500 on my Dell laptop which will still be working as I've never had a laptop break on me.
The resale argument doesn't really work if going on total cost of ownership.
Plus I didn't probably have to pay for Apple Care either as I can fix/replace/upgrade a lot of my Dell.
Plus what's the resale going to be on Macs when they all become non repairable/non upgradable?
@jason 7,
Sure, the Apple costs a bit more to buy; such that you might well end up at the same financial position after three years, including the resale value. But during those three years you'd have all the enjoyment that comes with owning an Apple product; whereas your Dell will afford you no such joy.
If you genuinely prefer the Dell then that's fine; but if you were hoping for a cheaper Apple equivalent, it's a false economy.
@Buzzword
Different strokes...
I've really enjoyed using my 13" Dell for the past 6 years (now with 8GB of ram and 120GB SSD all upgraded easily later).
I find Macbooks quite boring and samey myself. Plus I'd never buy a machine I couldn't upgrade/fix myself. Plus I have seen a few disgruntled Macbook users on my travels.
So I know its not all rainbows and lollipops over in Macbook land.
there are loads of refurbished resellers about, some have reasonable RTB warranty too. Ive picked up a few nice dells with dedicated GFX cards. Sometimes you can get some real open box weird spec bits of kit too.
Back to topic, probably loads of stock because most companies don't feel the need to upgrade. Quite a few schools run VDI so desktops are moot, last gen 3ghz dual core intels are still decent enough to run windows 7 and office especially if they are 4gb RAM desktops. Probably cheaper to bung an SSD in there as a quick boost anyway, £40 will get you a sandisk x110 and that will make a core2duo "appear" to be quicker than an i5 to the average person.
@Hans 1
"Yet curiously a three year-old second-hand MacBook will easily sell for at least 66% of list price. Fixed that."
Yes, but seriously only a small percentage of MacBooks will live to its 3rd year. The ones which do are probably the ones which were made by Foxcon on a good day.
in the corporate world you have to balance though. Generally new kit has onsite warranty. Have an issue, phone up and get someone else to fix it. If kit goes out of warranty then who will support it? The same goes for service contracts, when people have outsourced their IT then the contract company will also have warranty on the kit too, that means they don't need to send their own IT staff in to repair (depending on the issue). So even though (technically) the kit doesn't need replacing, they might replace it just for warranty purposes.
The huge number of 2 to 5 year old kit that is around, mainly core i3/5/7 running Win7 is more than adequate for just about everything most people need. All of these have got past the 'teething' stage of reliability and about the only thing some need is a replacement for a failing hard drive. There is just no compelling reason any more to upgrade, especially as most current offerings are more of a replacement than an upgrade. They aren't ten times faster, memory and storage are likewise not massively larger. Laptop batteries are still hours not days.
It'll need some massive driver of uptake like Lotus 1-2-3 was back in the days of 4.77MHz clocks and 256k RAM. I can't think what, but whoever can stands to make a fortune and give the industry at least a temporary boost.
The only surprises are that it seems to mainly be just the UK that hasn't seen the giant writing on the wall and that only one head has rolled so far.
I buy HP/DELL 2.5-3GHz C2D boxes with 4GB ram and 250-320GB HDDs with Windows 7 Pro and sell them on for £150.00.
Customers love them. If someone needs one with a little more grunt you can buy a E8400 CPU for around £7 or a C2Quad for not much more.
These are machines from 2009/10.
Manufacturers need to stop thinking that business users need to pay £400+ for a desktop.
£250 is as much as most business users need to spend on desktops.
@Jason 7, I've been looking for a nice box with say 500Gb, i5/7, 3-something RAM, a good graphics card, all that standard la la la, for my Photoshop and video-editing stuff, and even for refurbished I am being quoted at £300-500 for the box alone (which is all I want) when I know darn well that the refurbisher paid tuppence h'penny for it before giving a bit of a polish with his sleeve and putting it on the market. Yes, I could cobble this together myself but, life. So the deals go to IT purchasers who can stack 'em up, while the single purchaser sees no great deals out there. Sigh.
and I wonder if it is because all the modern equivalents of Lotus123 are Internet things like Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube which are designed not to make many demands on the local PC because they want to reach as many people as possible, even if their PCs are somewhat antiquated. All the hard work is done in the Cloud, so the PC ends up being a bit like a tv being broadcast to.
Hence the lack of need for an upgrade every two years.
Wyatt
That's the thing.
Suppliers seem very reluctant to drop the prices and sell more stuff/
I bought a Dell i7 job a few months ago. I got a much better machine for my £800 than many other big makers were asking, And even now when I look at the ads for other makes, most are still offering poorer spec for that kind of money than I paid.
But I also notice that Ebuyer offer a Dell with half the memory and HDD space that I have, and no mention of graphics card for what I paid,.
Whereas Dell itself now offer my machine with the addition of an SSD for the same price.
Which suggests that the retailers aren't in a hurry to shift boxes. OR even ask a sensible competitive price.
"Which suggests that the retailers aren't in a hurry to shift boxes. OR even ask a sensible competitive price."
I wonder if that's the problem with the business model. The economy seems to run on cheap debt these days. The cost of the debt interest/repayment is factored into the cost of the product and how fast it moves off the shelf. If stock turnover slows down the debt interest payments go up so selling "old" stock at a markdown cost them more than just part of a profit margin. There may well be carnage with some of the resellers if they don't cut their loses soon.
There is plenty of demand for new PCs a lot of consumer who I deal with who bought Windows 7 boxes are now waiting to get a new machine and are waiting for WIndows 10. Sure the canny ones will just upgrade their WIndows 7 for free, but a lot of my clients are combining a desire to have something new and shiny with a jump to Windows 10 as 8 was such a failure and so anti-desktop user.
I have recommended all my clients to hang fire and purchase their new PC/laptop once WIndows 10 is out and only if they are running Windows 8.1 to upgrade to the free WIndows 10.
So stop panicking or it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Siv
Greece is about to fall over heralding a new global recession.
The Windows 10 previews are just a cover for MS re-releasing Windows 3 .x as senior management believe that if they cycle back to that, they will get another 10-15 years of success.
My dog just relieved itself on your floor.
It's bad now but it's only going to get worse.
I'll give you a tenner for the lot - you can't say fairer than that...
The PC market is sitting on a ton of perfectly adequate hardware. The ones who want to move it are dropping their prices.
Last year, I started at a new workplace and replaced every single PC, it was cheap enough to do and didn't come anywhere near the price of replacing a single decent blade server. For that, I got rid of all the old junk that was lying around, I gave everyone the impression the machines were newer, faster, better (they were, but even what I bought was old models even if it was new stock, the biggest speed advantage came from a refresh and a clean image instead of the old multiply-cloned junk they were using, and they were better because they could all use the same image and "just worked" as they were clean installs of everything), I managed to give away a ton of old machines to charity, and I have a large stock of spares that are perfectly functional and can be slotted into any purpose in a few minutes.
The problem is - I did this more to remove any doubt about the old hardware than anything to do with it being 100% necessary. I bought old models because we didn't need the fancy new stuff. I just needed "shiny, and still in the plastic". As such, I won't be doing the same this year, or next year. Why would I? And, quite literally, the machines were so cheap that I didn't particularly care about replacing every machine on site - and they all came with original manufacturer warranty! Hell, just the spare keyboards, cables and mice they came with actually means I replenished an awful lot of my dwindling stock too.
Soon after, a supplier phoned up to say they had 20-something new machines they wanted rid of - fully boxed, warrantied, etc.. They were so cheap, I just said yes. Literally, that's the only reason I took them. They can use the same image and are pushed out as normal stock for replacements, etc.
PC's don't have a lot of money in them anymore. The money is in laptops (which I fight against because for our purposes they aren't suitable) and tablets (same) and in servers. The servers I have, I spent a lot more money on than all my desktops put together, twice. Probably more than that.
The end-user desktop needs are so low compared to the specs you get that I barely bother to read the specs any more. In my last place, we just pushed out Atom PC's because they were so ludicrously cheap and - literally - nobody could tell the difference. I had so-called "IT expert" staff telling me how fast and wonderful they were and could they have one. It had more to do with an extra couple of gig of RAM in an Atom than the processor power which you can barely notice in most office-type use nowadays.
And Windows 8 made the job easier as it actually can lower requirements. Windows 10 looks headed the same way. We don't need a ton of processing power, just a dual/quad core, plus a bit of RAM, and maybe if we're really showing off a graphics card jammed in there. Again, the cheapest one I can find should be more than adequate - we won't be playing Crysis 7 on them.
As such, those PC's in the warehouse are going to stay there until someone lowers the price. You want to sell PC's, you have to have other angles - service, warranty, software, integration, "packs" of laptop with charging trolleys, buy one server, get 10 PC's free, etc. PC's on their own aren't worth much. If you're paying more than £150 per PC (so call it £300 per seat once you add monitor, software, etc. but even there - why would you buy new monitors until your current flatscreen is inadequate?), you're just throwing money away unless you can justify it. And those PC's will be capable of virtualisation and all sorts themselves (Windows 8 Pro included Hyper-V, remember?).
Business PC's have plateaued. Great for me. I could redo the whole network of client two to three times a year if I needed to. Bad for sellers. They need to offer more than just box-shifting. And none of my suppliers has an interest in just selling me a bunch of PC any more. They are all about "service", "support", "relationships", etc. trying to get me to buy new servers every few months. Fact is, I'm set for the next few years at least, so god knows where they'll be making their money.
Yeah, agreed with the giving away prices. Our XP refresh required new Win 7 licences. However HP were doing a deal to get a rebate of £150 on some new PCs. These had a Win 7 OEM licence and due to a Volume Licensing benefit by buying a fed £5 VLs we could image them as well. In the end all the new PCs effectively cost £30~£40 to replace 5yo kit.
This post has been deleted by its author
I want a brand new laptop & if the folks on this side of the Pond were in such a position, I might be able to afford to get one.
Quad core, 2GHz, 8GiB RAM, 120GiB SSD, Gigabit LAN, and enough USB ports to make a hub unnecessary. Build quality that can take a few years of constant use, bouncing around in a laptop bag, getting bumped around while on the bus/train/plane, and not drop dead the first time it gets looked at funny. Screen size/resolution don't matter, & integrated GPU is fine since I won't be using the monitor at all. (See my other post about how I normally use a laptop.) All for a price that doesn't break the bank.
Over here I'm looking at nearly a thousand dollars or more for such a beast, and even then I have to trade battery life for a physical DVD burner. Really? Is it *THAT* difficult to fit a slot load DVD drive in that "thin & light", and make it *just* thick enough to include the damned LAN port? Because if I have to plug in an external DVD drive to make that physical backup of the drive, while having a USB LAN dongle plugged in to authenticate to the server, plus the USB keyboard, that bad boy needs four USB ports at a minimum (and the two for the DVD burner will require one to be Powered), else it won't work.
Besides, if I have to buy externals to put back the functionalities you removed to make it "thin & light", then you'd damn-well better drop the price to reflect that. No DVD drive? Chop off the $100 you would charge me if it were there. No LAN port? Then axe the hundred you would charge me for that port. Only a single USB port & it's a Type C connector that requires a specialty plug to interact with? Get out the chainsaw, that price better scream "Timber!" as it falls.
I've been told that I can get used Business Class machines with the specs I want for fairly cheap, but those are usually a generation or two (or more) behind the curve, and there's a REASON why they're USED. Maybe they've been treated like crap by employees whom didn't care since they were "only company property" after all. Maybe the connectors on the mobe are going to shit & while it passed inspection NOW, it won't in the day after the warranty runs out. Or it uses some proprietary chipset that no longer has drivers, which means you can't upgrade the OS from Windows XP even if you wanted to. Or that smell you experience every time it starts to overheat is nothing to be alarmed about, it's just the CPU reaching Critical Mass and waiting for an opportune moment to turn itself into a tiny super nova atop your crotch.
I want a *new* machine, one that I won't have to upgrade for at least five years (hardware wise) or the moment it gets out of the box (software), at a price that only an Apple addict could afford.
Bah.
I want a *new* machine, one that I won't have to upgrade for at least five years
I have a bag of shite. The BIOS is dated 2009, so I've had it about 4 years, after my neighbours threw it out. I expect it to last at least another year, making the 5 years you're after.
It cost me £9 for a new power cable. I could probably have got that cheaper if I'd looked a little harder.
Hardware is much more resilient that many people think. The trick is to understand when the black smoke has run out, and when it's merely a software fault masquerading as a terminal failure...
Vic.
RPi and a new monitor, os, keyboard and mouse and wifi and backup drive all for less than £200 gives you a very satisfactory PC.
You can kit a child out with their own RPi pc plugged into a telly for £50 or a gamer often just requires a new graphics card in an old PC.
But most people seem quite happy sitting there with their tablet. Someone is going to have to go to a lot of effort to make someone buy a PC these days.
Okay the hardware is inexpensive but will my Creative Suite CS3 (or 4 or 5 or 6) run in that environment.
The above is an example and maybe the problem is not as much hardware but "will my favourite and/or bespoke but certainly adorable and very expensive at the time software work ticketty-boo too?"?
No?
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