Locator: 50899PCS.
The problem: folks don't need high-end PCs. Apple is noting that.
Nice update regarding PCs.
Over at Barron's. Link here.
A new kind of PC, even one armed with an Nvidia chip, will be an uphill climb. Amid a memory shortage, it could hardly be a worse moment to be launching a new PC platform.
The history is tough too: a 15-year project of expanding Windows PCs beyond Intel and Advanced Micro Devices has seen little payoff.
Steep memory price hikes are hurting sales of all kinds of consumer electronics, nowhere more so than in PCs. Market research firms and PC makers alike expect unit sales to shrink by almost 20% in the second half of this year, with most of the damage coming in low-price tiers. Among other mitigation efforts, manufacturers are raising prices.
Ironically, it’s Nvidia, the data-center chip maker, that’s responsible for much of the shortage in the first place.
This year, just five companies may spend over three-quarters of a trillion dollars on AI data centers, and much of that goes for Nvidia chips. Each of Nvidia’s coming Vera Rubin servers essentially uses the memory equivalent of 14,500 MacBook Neos.
Nvidia is likely targeting the high end of the PC market, which is less affected by the memory price hikes. The bigger problem for Nvidia is years of false starts when it comes to running Microsoft Windows on anything but x86 chips.
Since IBM chose an Intel CPU for its first PC in 1980, chips based around the x86 architecture have run Microsoft DOS and Windows PCs. AMD also makes x86 PC chips and has about a quarter of the market now.
Microsoft has tried to break its x86 reliance, with little success. Chips using architecture from Arm Holdings now dominate smartphones and Apple MacBooks, but they have been notably absent from Windows PCs; Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Nvidia have been trying to change that since 2011, and it’s still a work in progress.
