Which dollar is that, then?

Surely the only dollar whose value is important in determining PC prices, these days, is the New Taiwan Dollar?

Acer can say what they like, as far as I see it. If you buy an Acer laptop, you're just buying a Quanta Computer laptop, with an Acer badge stuck on it, anyway - and since that's true of a third of all the laptops in the global market (including all the Apple ones), and a great many desktops, it's surely Quanta, that will determine how much component prices influence the market? This story is about what the monkey has to say - but I see Barry Lam, winding the handle on the organ: why not ask him what's going to happen?

"Have to replace aging kit"? Why?

Stuff breaks - that's inevitable. But the assumption that a business needs to replace their PCs every other year is pretty seriously out of touch with reality. The truth is that for your average business user whose main apps are Word, Outlook and IE (other word-pro, email and browser software is available, as the BBC are wont to say), a five-year-old PC will still be perfectly adequate - in fact, I'd bet money that the majority of users would be unable to tell the difference between a five-year-old PC and a current PC if they were loaded with the same software and used for these kind of everyday office jobs. Hell, a ten-year-old machine would be good enough too - you might notice a slight slow-down, but I doubt it'd be anything that'd get in the way of writing emails, doing accounts or surfing the web.

A lot of places are wising up to this, particularly in larger companies where cost of IT is significant. Automatic PC refreshes are very much not the norm these days - if you want a new PC then you'd better have a good business case for it. And since we're still only taking baby steps out of a very serious recession, you can be damn sure that no-one's going to be throwing money around like it was 1999. So I hope Acer aren't pinning too much on this, because I think they're likely to be severely disappointed.

Time to trim the fat

We only need bigger PCs because of software bloat. Once operating systems (all of 'em) and applications writers - particularly the writers of application suites start to remove the crap from their products, start making efficient software designs and get away from tick-box feature creep the better.

As it is, one of the biggest drags on PC performance is the security software. It's amazing how fast that old P4 can be when you free it from the ball-and-chains of virus scanners, email guards, anti-malware and website safeguards ('corse you might just catch something nasty - oh well, the price of speed).

[ I did have a whole piece here about the inefficiencies of Linux, too. But just thinking about where to start drained my will to live by too much. ]

So what we need is a kind of renaissance in PC land. Small, well designed O/S;s without all their legacy code. Tight applications without 6 million extra functions that no-one except trojan writers ever use. A security regime that is designed into (rather than bolted on afterwards) the software and has a low operational impact and APIs for hardware support that are adhered to and don't change. If "they" can cram all this into a phone, why not a desktop, too?

Please yourself...

If prices rise, then sales will go down .... thimple!!

Many businesses are hard enough pressed, so purchases will be put off another year. Whatever we're told, there's still a recession on for most of us.

Home users buy lower-end kit anyway, and there's a make or break price in home computers - ask any supermarket. There are nerds who buy everything new, of course, but they aren't enough to sustain an industry.

So ... prices may well rise for a while, but anyone want to open a book on when - in desperation - the knockdown sales start?

Prices up, or specs down?

Will prices go up, or specs go down? Personally, I would not spend 12% more on a PC -- I would get a PC with 12% lower specs than I would have otherwise. I only have one system that even has 1GB of RAM, Athlon XPs. I do have huge hard disks, but I buy them aftermarket. I don't touch Windows with a 10-foot pole so I have no speed problems with them. If/when I buy something new, I would just cut the chip spec a step or two, or cut a superfluos GB or two to keep my price down. Simple as that.

Prices will fall...

When the world embraces LinArm and computers become comoditized "internet appliances".

Most business users don't need much.

An email client, office apps (WP, Spreadsheet, Presentation) and a browser seem to answer most needs. Oddly enough, we used to run this kind of software on old 486s, back in the day...

Obviously important techie bods like myself are the exception to this rule. The latest, shiniest, bestest hardware and software available on the market is an absolute necessity if I'm going to do my ever-so-important job. but for normal office drones I don't imagine this'll mean much more than an extra six months between hardware refreshes...

10-15% is small beer

The 25% devaluation sterling last year has already pushed up prices, at least for small companies. We bought some Dell kit in Aug 2007 and the same model but lower spec now costs ~40% more (429/unit now vs 304/unit then). We'd have to buy a different and more expensive model to acheive the same spec which would push the replacement price to well over 50% more. So what if there's another 10-15% increase.

However I expect it will be more complicated for Acer than the sales guys think. The impact for us has been to find out about cloud computing and virtualization. Both, we have discovered, have allowed us greater flexibility and to extract more value from existing kit.

Also, the components manufacturers have responded to the lower demand by reducing supply. When demand returns, so will the components which will undermine the Acer position.

ASP means???

I'm guessing ASP means Actual Selling Price?