1La fin de régulières baisses de prix de PC?

Je reg-u-lièrement construction PC pour les personnes, et ont récemment été à la recherche d'un spec haut de gamme pour quelqu'un. J'ai commencé, comme je le fais souvent, en regardant ce que j'avais obtenu pour un système haut de gamme il ya un an, pour voir si elle valait déplace jusqu'à la nouvelle génération, ou si une baisse importante de la spécification plus rendu tentant de répéter. Dans le passé, l'ancien système de l'année a toujours été nettement moins cher, so I was quite sur­prised to find that this time it was­n’t. Première, let’s look at the core parts of the sys­tem — then, and now. I’ll also com­pare this to a new gen­er­a­tion equi­val­ent to see what that looks like.

Ouch! So the new gen­er­a­tion sys­tem is £53.10 more expens­ive (sur 10%) but the old spec, bought today, would be more expens­ive than it was a year ago!  This can­’t be accoun­ted for by 1 volat­ile item (like RAM ou HDD), because whilst the RAM has increased by £30 (over 40%), none of the oth­er com­pon­ents has dropped by an appre­ciable amount. It looks like Intel’s dom­in­ance of the CPU world is mean­ing speed improve­ments are much slower to arrive, and their older CPUs aren’t fall­ing in price. This in turn means mother­boards and RAM also aren’t devalu­ing either.

The full spec

Lets look and see if prices for oth­er parts of the sys­tem have dropped, for those look­ing to build an entire system

So the old spec has dropped by £7 over­all. A new gen­er­a­tion machine, which is largely the same spec, is £20 more. So really, things haven’t changed at all. In a year!

Two lessons learned

1. Giv­en that there is no obvi­ous reas­on for the cur­rent trend to change, now is not a good time to “wait for prices to fall” If you’re look­ing for new kit then now really is as good a time as any to invest.

2. Desktop PC innov­a­tion looks to have col­lapsed as the mar­ket has moved to mobile (i.e. portable, tab­let and phone).  Expect future gen­er­a­tions to offer the same (or very sim­il­ar) per­form­ance with lower power con­sump­tion. This means older high per­form­ance desktop CPUs will con­tin­ue to hold their value, as the desktop upgrade mar­ket has­n’t ever been driv­en by a need to reduce power use.