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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials
AMAT 297.52-6.6%Feb 4 3:59 PM EST
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To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (17006)3/4/1998 2:32:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd  Read Replies (2) of 70976
 
Teri,

Not quite true. Today's $1000 PC contains a lot of the same components that went into a $2000 PC a year ago. The components are just a lot cheaper now. So we are not "cutting corners", rather we are "mainstreaming" PCs which in the past probably would have been considered "obsolete" by the major manufacturers.

Think back a couple of years to the point when Pentium was mainstream. You could always find somebody to sell you a "good enough" high-end 486 for a few hundred bucks. Today the top end is moving towards PII and K6 machines at high speeds and with huge disk-drives. So for under a thousand dollars you can buy a P166 or P200 with a 2GB drive, effectively the same PC I bought for $2500 just 18 months ago.

This is mostly market growth. It comes from the realization by major manufacturers that there are a lot of people who are happy to have an "older tech" PC for a lot less, and does not necessarily cut into the demand from experienced users who still want the "current tech" at $1500-2000 pricepoints.

This is partially internet driven. It doesn't take a whole lot of power to run a browser, so there is an increasing number of people who don't need a real "current generation" PC but still want more capability than a WebTV box gives them.

How this shakes out for the semi and equipment manufacturers in the long run is still a bit unclear.

mg
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