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Desktop GPU Sales Lowest in Decades: Report
(www.tomshardware.com)
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I'm not surprised; I was killing some time at Micro Center yesterday and couldn't believe how high the prices were. Shelves were pretty much completely full. I found better deals over in the laptops for GPUs. At least with that purchase you get a whole computer.
Even that isn't a good deal. Laptop GPUs are a lot weaker than their desktop counterparts, the 4070 (laptop edition) is LITERALLY a 4060 desktop edition. They're misleading consumers into buying something worse than they're expecting, and the prices are still outrageous for the new generation.
It's really shitty they are doing this. When desktops are providing way better price to performance ratio, they are trying to create the illusion that you can still get comparable performance with a slight increase in price, when in reality you are sacrificing a substantial amount of performance for mobility.
If they made this part clear, I don't think there would be any appreciable decrease in laptop sales too.
Do you think anyone opts to buy a laptop when they have no absolute need for mobility?
Yeah, they do. A laptop is plug-and-play. It has all the things are computer needs already built into it. If you just want a thinking-rock to do your emails for you, a laptop is relatively painless. Then if something happens to it, you take it to a third-party to fix it up for you.
Story time:
I'm a desktop person, but my mother was always a laptop person. She was looking to replace her laptop on life support; I suggested to use desktop because she didn't actually need the mobility, it was cheaper for the same power potential, it could be upgraded piecemeal and for cheaper, and she could get a larger screen (for her struggling vision).
Desktops are so bulky, it takes up so much space on her desk. I also didn't expect her needing several different peripherals that her laptop had built in (microphone, speakers, webcam, more USB slots). Yes it will be cheaper for her in the long-run even with those unexpected costs, those peripherals will work with any desktop tower, but she's so frustrated with it she already wants to give up on it.
I'm also stuck being her go-to person when she wants to complain. How the desktop is just so horrible she's still trying to use her laptop anyway, how she may as well get rid of the desktop because it's caused nothing but trouble and nobody will help her etc... she used to be complaining that the laptop was so horrible she'd have to buy a new computer, too. (tbh there's no scenario where her life isn't eternal suffering.)
If she really does just give up on the desktop (very in the realm of possibility for her), I'm not going through this again. She can have her overpriced, low-output laptop. The bonus is that as a desktop person, I can deny any expectation of fixing it for her.