Unless they would rather spend the money on a good SPEC machine...
I really guess it all depends on what you're buying a machine to do. I agree that given the present level of software most users would do fine with a Celeron/Duron. The question is will they be equally happy in 3 years? I built a Pentium II system in 1998... 350MHz, 128Meg 100MHz ECC RAM, set the motherboard to 100MHz, used the 3.5X clock. Ultimately went with a sound blaster platinum sound card... Ultimately had 30GB of HD space (started with 10). 16Meg Viper 550 AGP 2D/3D card... It was a pretty phat system at the time and it was nearly top-of-the-line when it was purchased. Now on some newer applications it's starting to move as slowly as a sloth... Oh sure, it's still great on Word Perfect, Word 2000 (which only further underscores Intel's point about older benchmarks), Photoshop 4... and it will make a great secondary and light gaming computer for another 2 or 3 years. As a primary system for a power user, it however, can no longer keep pace. I've since assembled a P3 1GHz system which I'm currently integrating into my home network, and I hope to get 2 or 3 years out of it. So if you're not a power user, or don't ever want to buy new software, a Celeron/Duron system will work fine. If, however, you want to buy new software... "value" PC's show their age quickly... Again, in 1998, the Pentium II with a 100MHz bus was the bleeding edge... it's now pretty much obsolete as a primary machine.
The problem with the P4 right now is that there aren't enough "killer apps" for it... so it has a LOT more computing power than people are able to use on most applications. I would wager someone buying a 1GHz P3 or even a 1.2GHz K7 will have 2 or 3 good years of computing before the top-end applications start making it choke. I think buying a P4 buys you at least an additional year at this point... maybe 1.5. So if you divide the cost across the useful lifetime of the computer... it mitigates the higher price (which isn't THAT much higher anymore!).
In my mind, that's good value for the customer, although unless the proliferation of software increases, the computer cycle lifetime could be longer which spells potentially lower profits in the PC industry... As per normal, what one hand gives, the other takes away... |
