The dropping cost of hardware
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the way that hardware continues to drop in cost. This really came home to me when I specced and built a couple of machines for my parents. My parents have the misfortune to have a son who knows his way around a computer and as a result has been able to keep their computers running far longer than they really should have. My mother’s computer was just over 11 years old this year when I replaced it, and had (from memory) 3 replacement power supplies, more RAM, 2 replacement HDD, 3 replacement DVD/CDRom drives, 1 replacement sound card, 2 replacement NICs.
My parents use their computers largely for email, surfing the web and editing the odd word and excel documents. In this part of the market the AMD chips win hands down in bang for your buck. In the end I go something like (monitors were not needed):
- AM2 4000
- nVidia chipset AT motherboard with integrated gfx & dual channel RAM
- 2xaGb DDR2 800 RAM
- DVD burner
- 160Gb 7200rpm seagate HDD
- antec case
- XP home
For a total of $485 (AUD) per machine.
All name brand parts, none really bottom of the market parts. To keep this in perspective, under 10 years ago I paid ~$800 (AUD) for a 700Mhz slot A Athlon for first computer I ever built, the total cost of the computer was.
The crazy thing about this is that these computers are quite frankly overpowered for their needs. There are people who need more: gaming, video editing, graphical work, programmers, however these computers are overpowered for most people’s needs. Even then, moving to a Core2 Duo and an ATX motherboard, adding a larger HDD and adding a gfx card would likely still keep the price under $1000 (AUD), you could probably get it below the price of my prized slot A Athlon processor.
Interestingly that processor is still running … it is in the machine that currently hosts this website.
The other interesting part of this purchase is that the OS makes up $109 of that $485, or 22% of that is the OS. For comparison the OS was under 10% of the cost for the machine this replaced. This should be warning to Microsoft, particularly when there are other credible alternatives.