How will Apple's quarterly profits be like if they delayed to your expectations?
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Upgrading to M3 chip
- Thread starter Hamman93
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This is already happening, but it's due to sheer greed from the manufacturers. When nVidia dropped the 20xx series of GPUs at a 20-35% hike over their comparable 10xx models, that started the upwards trend in the graphic card market. Intel is actually doing the same thing on the CPU front with the 14th gen CPUs (aka Raptor Lake refresh) carrying a 15-20% price hike over the 13th gen SKUs they're replacing). Even on the motherboard side a lot of basic motherboards in 2023 cost what high-end boards cost in 2018, and the market as a whole keeps raising prices then acting dumbfounded when people aren't buying in the quantities they expect. To make this point clear: the price hikes occurred BEFORE the slowdowns in the custom PC market rather than after.
The other factor at play here besides price hikes from manufacturers is that with COVID lockdowns in the past, most people have returned to working out of their home, so the big demand to buy computers, printers, etc. that existed in 2020 is no longer present. That lowers demand across the board, although some electronics retailers (Best Buy) are too stubborn to acknowledge that fact and are instead lying to their share holders and employees about how everyone has moved to online shopping, when the truth is BBY drove people out of their stores by deliberately understaffing and understocking them.
It is actually a self feeding loop. Factors that caused people to delay buying or not buying a PCs are
- 2007 iPhone & 2008 Android smartphones being good enough for most consumer's personal computing, MP3, camera, gaming and dumbphone needs
- smartphones getting "pushed" to users every end of carrier contracts. no other device does this.
- hardware performance outpacing software demands
- mass market consumer's aversion to upgrading internal parts & preferring replacing whole devices thus the creation of Thunderbolt for external upgrades
- consumer behavior changes... overhead & stock availability's better online. increasing labor cost of $15/hr just kills off brick & mortar operations
I just went to the closest lux mall to me that was 2.5 miles away and almost half the retail shops shut down to be replaced by restaurants... my friend obsessed with bookstores and buying his devices over the counter will really suffer depression of not being able to buy his things in person. He was born in 1979 and not 1949.
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The whole idea of an "annual update" for computers always strikes me as wrong. The industry has always been in a game of one-upmanship but the timing of major improvements is not synchronized to Earth's orbit.
Annual updates in the auto industry led to the massive innovations in tail-fin design in the late 1950s.
For years (going back to at least the early 2000s), the PC industry has refreshed their product lineups every 3-4 months. While that is nothing new, what has changed is the product lifecycles for CPU and GPU generations updating on a more regular basis. Now that Intel has moved to what's roughly an annual cycle for new generations of CPUs, AMD has followed suit to some extent, as have Nvidia, AMD and (now) Intel on the GPU front. While AMD did make a big shift between their 5xxx and 7xxx parts (5nm process, AM4 to AM5, DDR5 support only among others), Intel has taken their "tick tock" approach to another extreme with the upcoming 14th gen parts, which are just speed-bumped replacements for the 13th gen CPUs, yet are carrying roughly a 20% price hike over the CPUs they're replacing. Intel's process naming scheme is a mess, because they're using the term "Intel 7" to refer to what's a refined 10nm process), which is confusing to those who follow the technical aspects of these systems. The reports are that their 15th gen will be the big "leap" in performance, but we'll have to wait for those to hit production to know for sure.
The ability to go into a store and pick up something you need same-day is a convenience many people would prefer. The issue with retailers such as Best Buy is that their website is almost as bare as their physical stores lately. Their CEO has deliberately made the in-store experience as miserable as possible for customers and employees alike, all in the name of maximizing her own bonus and shareholder dividends at the expense of the company's reputation.
As far as the mall example goes, I can point out two malls in my area that had turnover through the COVID lockdowns, but are currently thriving. While one of the malls has lost 80% of its food court tenants, the rest of the mall is largely occupied save for a couple of store fronts which are reserved for seasonal popups. The point is that neither your one example nor my two examples are indicative of the overall health of the mall business model, you'd have to look at annual reports from the big management firms such as Simon or CBL to see what the overall health is.