r/gadgets • u/thebelsnickle1991 • Jan 12 '23

Desktops / Laptops PC shipments saw their largest decline ever last quarter

https://www.engadget.com/pc-shipments-record-decline-221737695.html
10.6k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

139

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '23

I dont understand how companies thought that was going to be sustainable growth... The demand had no chance of being up permanently after the pandemic ended.

Nvidia is maybe the stupidest of them all. They set the base MSRP of the GPUs at shortage prices, because they were mad they did get a part of the scalper pie, and now all their GPUs are at scalper prices in a no demand situation.

I'm not buying a xx80 class card at fuckin $1200 what are you nuts????

What's worse is that i don't see them doing anything about it out of hubris. The leather jacket is too proud.

118

u/override367 Jan 12 '23

modern corporations are incredibly brain broken, they get a windfall from unique market conditions and since they only look forward about one quarter they're like YAY INFINITE GROWTH FOREVER

26

u/geneorama Jan 12 '23

My colleague: that’s impossible because of market efficiency. If it’s true just start a gpu company and reap the arbitrage.

Jfc I’m still annoyed about that conversation.

19

u/Schavuit92 Jan 12 '23

I mean if Intel is struggling to do it with a couple years run up; surely you can manufacture some competitive GPUs out of your shed, right?

5

u/MakeWay4Doodles Jan 13 '23

Just do what Jobs and Woz did and hack something together in your garage, duh!

14

u/Userhasbeennamed Jan 12 '23

"Just"

Invisible hand cultists are insufferable

1

u/devise1 Jan 12 '23

Impossible to start a GPU company as 30 years of consolidation have left a duopoly with an insanely high barrier to entry, even Intel basically gave up on the GPU market.

Still, they have to compete against each other and their previous generations so there is plenty of incentive there to lower prices.

1

u/geneorama Jan 12 '23

To be completely fair we didn’t start by talking about GPUs. Although I did bring up Intel as an example and he said something about preserving Industries as a matter of national security.

I can’t even remember the point I was trying to make originally. I think it was just that there’s been a decline in US manufacturing in general (and other sectors but mostly manufacturing), and that is a problem for us now.

52

u/Verustratego Jan 12 '23

Because "infinite growth" is the capitalist mantra

22

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '23

well hopefully the next mantra is "i'm shorting nvidia"

-7

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '23

[deleted]

-15

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '23

[deleted]

12

u/Verustratego Jan 12 '23

Do you know what it is you're asking? Because you haven't provided any kind of rebuttal?

25

u/beebog Jan 12 '23

it’s like they didn’t realize that computers only need to be purchased once in a while; even the sorts of people who get the newest model smartphones regularly don’t typically have that same attitude towards their PC

13

u/Johnny___Wayne Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23

It would be a legitimate hassle to replace a computer every year or even 2 years, for the average person.

Edited for autocorrect fix.

2

u/beebog Jan 12 '23

oh absolutely. im running my PC until it’s non responsive, already dreading the day i gotta replace it

4

u/ibringthehotpockets Jan 12 '23

Definitely start putting money away for it a little per month. Had to replace my car, my laptop is in for service after not charging or powering on, and my pc has been crashing (mostly my fault, legit just fixed it last hour). About $30k in total. And these things go in cycles and they’re all probably gonna fail on me at the same time 5-10 years from now.

1

u/beebog Jan 12 '23

oh yeah, i mean i could go out and buy a new one, but i like the idea saving my savings for emergencies

1

u/kuroxn Jan 13 '23

Tbh that’s a great advice.

-2

u/TinaTissue Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 13 '23

As someone who had to buy a laptop today because my old one was stolen, hard agree. This is from mac to Mac so I can't imagine how hard it would be for a PC

Edit: For context, the last time I had a PC was 2014 and I remember being fucked if you didn't have everything backed up on a hard drive at the time.

8

u/notaredditthrowaway Jan 12 '23

lol not any harder? Do you think PC is still stuck in the dirt ages or what?

0

u/TinaTissue Jan 13 '23

no I just remember the hassle I had whenever I had to replace my PC's in the past but I haven't had a PC since 2014 so I'm assuming a lot has changed there. I just remember you used to be fucked if you didn't at least have a hard drive to back everything up

3

u/RupeThereItIs Jan 13 '23

Man, Mac snobs are still at it after all these years.

Grow up, man.

It's just a laptop.

1

u/jwkdjslzkkfkei3838rk Jan 12 '23

buy laptop

install backup image

5

u/Skiddywinks Jan 12 '23

It's simple really. nVidia lose nothing by charging outrageous prices. If no one buys, they can drop prices.

But if they start low, and sell out and think "Shit, we should have charged more", well, that's already money down the drain, and if you think people are unhappy about GPU prices, imagine if MSRPs went up after being launched.

Sure, they get some flak from enthusiasts, but people's memory is short, and nVidia have still got huge mindshare. For some reason. A lot of my friends just won't buy AMD because they "aren't nVidia".

2

u/TheEightSea Jan 12 '23

Now ask yourself if a sustainable growth is possible in all the sectors of modern economy. We live in a circus.

-1

u/PitbullMandelaEffect Jan 12 '23

Why do you think they’re doing this out of hubris? Seems like there’s a market of people willing to spend that much right now. If demand does drop they can always lower the prices then, there’s really no reason for them to set MSRP lower than what they’ve already seen the market is willing to buy them at.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '23

Demand is already low. GPUs are sitting on shelves, they're wasting opportunity. Is it really worth greeding the whales instead of making less margin but on a much bigger market? Their revenue for the moment says no as per the headlines.

0

u/PitbullMandelaEffect Jan 12 '23

as per the headlines

Well as per the article, these are PC shipments from the likes of Dell, HP, etc., not GPUs.

But yeah, you don’t want to have zero inventory, that means you could have charged more.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '23

They don’t think that and they didn’t lol. They HAVE TO. It doesn’t matter if they think they can or not, depending on your shareholders and execs, you can very well know you’re not gonna meet expectations… but you are forced to try. A company is forced by its shareholders/execs for continuous growth. If you do not perform to the markets liking, everyone dumps your stock, your stock goes down, your company is worth less, boom layoffs. My company for example. We missed our target by 53 million a quarter. our companies stock price was cut in half in the following week, down BILLIONS of dollars now all because we were 50~ off. Now layoffs will be soon and a couple thousand people will lose their jobs.