Comment Articles

Squeezing the PC margins

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 07 Jun 2001 15:59 BST

What has yet to be surveyed, however, is not the actual sales of complete PCs, but the sales of bits and pieces for addons.

The problem I suspect we'll discover will be that -- yes, quite probably, people will save money on a new PC, by buying extra upgrade bits for their old one.

But at the same time, I suspect that there will be an opposite effect depressing sales of accessories.

Take, for example, the installation of my own favourite PC addon -- a wireless network card and a wireless hub. I've written enthusiastically, in recent months, about the way a Buffalo access point has transformed my life, both at home, where it connects me to the Internet from the sitting room (and the bathroom if necessary) and at work, where it frees me from having to carry a different network card around, and load of different drivers.

To me, it's a no-brain deal. But readers have complained that "it's all very well you saying how good the stuff is, but if you check prices, you'll see that we still have to spend nearly five hundred pounds! Heck, I can buy a whole PC for that!"

The problem is that with PC prices as low as they are, and with no obvious reason to buy a really top-class PC until you plan to play Black & White, the cost of even quite important peripherals has to come down to match.

With upgrade memory, it's hard for me to believe the prices. My own raddled memory goes back to the days when 8K (yes, K) of RAM cost several hundred pounds. You can get a gigabyte of memory today for what I spent on my first S100 bus RAM card, with just exactly 8K on it -- enough to load BASIC, but not enough to load any programs as well.

But people aren't impressed, because for that same price, they can get so damn much PC!

The newest GeForce graphics accelerator costs well over three hundred pounds. That's getting on for more than half the price of a PC which would be quite quick enough to benefit -- you don't have to fork out nearly two grand to get that class of hardware. So people are saying that they expect that built into the motherboard.

And of course, they will get it; within 18 months, GeForce 3 chips will be issued as standard, in PCs probably costing well under a thousand pounds.