Fred,
Re: Retail sales of PC's represents a small portion of total PC sales. I posted a link to an article earlier in the year that estimated that US retail sales of PC's represented 5% of the worldwide PC market.
Here is more on the subject:
www1.zdnet.com
Re: Also, the other segment of PC's that is growing as fast (percentage wise) as the sub $1000 system are notebooks. These are on the very high end of both revenue and margin.
I agree about the notebook market. The amounts of money corporations spend on notebooks, without examining the value they are receiving is amazing.
But here too I see a significant reduction of ASPs in the near future. As a notebook user, you had to battle with lousy displays, small and slow hard drives, short battery life.
I think now with much improved low power CPUs from Intel, 8 Gig drives from IBM and pretty decent screens on the market, you can get a machine that even I could live with (and I hate working on notebooks)
I think a machine that is state the art now that sell for > $4,000, the first notebooks that are acceptable, will be $2,000 a year from now. The pressure to get the latest and greatest will be diminished.
What was driving the prices up was that people were just suffering working on previous notebooks, and were willing to pay any price to get a relief.
Finally a real relief is here.
Joe |
