The State of the PC Hardware Business

With the face-off between AMD and Intel on the processor market coming to a close, we have seen the proliferation of neither party as the victor. The market has found a place for both of these manufacturers, with AMD offering a more price friendly market of CPUs and Intel dominating the high end market through their innovations and research into multi core technology and cache optimization. In this article I will attempt to examine some of the issues in the hardware market today, and some of the inequalities that result with consumers suffering.

The largest inequality you will see in the computing market is none other than the atrocious mark-up basic leads suffer from. At any retail store you will be unable to pick up any basic HDMI lead for less than £10, but why, when these only cost a miniscule amount in raw materials and production? If the consumers were to check on Ebay for that exact same lead, they’d find that Chinese manufacturers are looking to fill in that gap in the western cable market with their comparatively fairly marked up leads. Personally I interpret this as the western markets yet again refusing to move with the times and realise that retail dominance no longer means anything with the new generation of internet shoppers.

The market for PC gaming hardware has also grown massively in the final quarter of 2010 and onwards from then. The state of freeze that gaming consoles puts the hardware is starting to anger a lot of consumers, taking into consideration that hardware has had some massive innovations in the 6 years since this current generation of consoles has arisen. If the consumers are still going to pay the maximum price for the newest games, they are showing with their buying power that they don’t want to play it on 6 year old equipment.
Nvidia constantly squaring off with ATI proves to keep the prices of graphics acceleration prices competitive. Using such ATI/NVIDIA GPU technology in most laptops and home PCs in an a non-enthusiast package for general day to day usage, allows for both companies to keep researching new graphical innovations and breakthroughs for enthusiasts everywhere, it also wouldn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to theorize that either an ATI or a Nvidia GPU will make it’s way into the next generation of consoles.

This year we have seen the withdrawal of HP from the hardware market. This would be no surprise to any enthusiast as they were more known for selling basic level PCs with some outer style overhauls at a premium to the consumer.

The improvements that the business could offer to the consumer, in my opinion would be for products should be priced at a genuine value in opposition to adding huge mark-ups justified by their “brand power” we’re seeing a strong demand from consumers for apple products to start competing in the hardware market too. Devices like the I pad, sold for £500 with 64GB internal memory without a removable SD slot are just unfair and unjustified. Disallowing removable memory on a product platform that has had it as a standard since 2003, purely for the purpose of charging an extra £200 for an internal memory upgrade is just plain unfair on consumers. It isn’t just the manufacturer’s fault though, if consumers were to wise up to issues like this before they simply threw their money at the latest apple gadget, they’d see that the underdog competition has a lot more to offer in terms of innovation and product versatility.

I believe as the consumer becomes more educated as to what product choices to make, the business will be forced to evolve with it. Unfortunately, we live in an age when your average PC consumer is incredibly uneducated as to what purchase decisions are wise.

Harry is a business consultant and has been fortunate enough to work with a number of successful companies. During his career, he has seen the various marketing techniques used whilst working as a marketing consultant in Macclesfield, where he offered business advice and business coaching. For more information on any of the topics raised in the article please visit Get Results.