News PC Makers Intensify Chip Stockpiling to Fight Shortages

[Admin]

HP and other makers of PCs are increasingly placing long-term component orders to ward off shortages.

PC Makers Intensify Chip Stockpiling to Fight Shortages : Read more

 

[Heat_Fan89]

Of course the Top 3 PC makers remain bullish and they should. Today it's either buying an overpriced GPU from a "scalper" which is 2-3 times the MSRP or buying a prebuilt. I've been building my own gaming rigs since the late 90's. Now 30 yrs later it's next to impossible to buy GPU parts without having to deal with Newegg's Shuffle or a scalper/bot.

So I bought an HP and Alienware gaming rig both cheaper than buying just the GPU. And to show how bad it's gotten, Alienware is notorious for selling their Desktop Gaming rigs at huge discounts. It is why I purchased an Alienware desktop. Now those Alienware discount gaming rigs are rarely seen.

Btw, what does "TAM" stand for?

 

[plateLunch]

"We have a very old install base — four, five or six years old at huge numbers," said Lanci. "Because if you want to get a good experience, you need a brand-new PC, not a four- or five-year-old PC.

Unless you are playing games or doing heavy compute intensive tasks, this isn't true. I'm using a 7 year old i7 machine as my main computer and I haven't been agonizingly pining for a new machine. I've been trying to replace it for the past 2 years but the thing holding me up is the pricing and availability of graphics cards.

The best thing that can be done for a standard user is to swap out their spinning hard disk and replace it with an SSD. They'll think they got a new PC.

TAM - Total Addressable Market (Google is your friend)

 

[watzupken]

As PC makers intensify stockpiling, they are creating shortages elsewhere. Factories have a max productivity, so it is a 0 sum game. If a factory produces 100,000 units of a components each month, and the PC makers soak up 80% of them, that leaves others with only 20%. Of course given the current absurd pricing of GPUs, I think it may be a good thing now where scalpers are not able to get as many GPUs with PC makers grabbing them and selling them at a more sane price. The price for almost all RTX 3080 sold by scalpers is enough for one to get a preassembled PC with a RTX 3080 with a small $$ top up.

 

[InvalidError]

Those analysts are awfully optimistic expecting the covid-surge to extend over years to come. Almost everything that needed upgrading to enable more work-from-home has been upgraded and the market will be returning to the pre-covid slow sales decline once that is over.

 

[spongiemaster]

Unless you are playing games or doing heavy compute intensive tasks, this isn't true. I'm using a 7 year old i7 machine as my main computer and I haven't been agonizingly pining for a new machine. I've been trying to replace it for the past 2 years but the thing holding me up is the pricing and availability of graphics cards.

The majority of the users he's talking about aren't going to be using i7's. Almost all prebuilts from four or five years ago will be non-hyper threaded i3's with some i5's using a mechanical hard drive.