- Oct 17, 2009
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Something interesting I've noticed while doing some laptop shopping lately....
I bought a Toshiba laptop 10 years ago for $300 and it had a Celeron processor and 2GB of RAM and 250GB HDD. It lasted 5 years and admittedly wasn't very fast and gave me problems. HDD failed and I had to replace it once. It was my first computer.
Then I bought my current Dell for the same price of $300 with i3 processor and 6GB of RAM and 500GB HDD and it's lasted me 5 years (so far) and has been everything I've ever wanted. Hasn't given me any problems at all. Quite a nice upgrade from the previous laptop.
So, I figure I should be able to spend $300 again after another 5 years and get something that would be at least as much better now as my Dell is over that old Toshiba since just as much time has passed. But the current $300 offerings are ironically worse than what were available 5 years ago when I got my Dell. Hard drive capacity has dropped from 500GB down to 120GB (admittedly is a SSD instead of HDD, but that's the only improvement), the RAM dropped from 6GB down to 4GB, the processor went from Intel i3 back to the same Celeron as my Toshiba had 10 years ago, and the screen size went from 15.6" down to 14".
Now that my current Dell laptop is 5 years old and I'm depending on it now more than ever, I'm getting rather concerned about what I'll be having to settle for if it broke down.
With the current shortage of computer chips and other electronic parts, it got me to wondering if computers have increased in price over what they were before the shortage, or if technology in general is taking a turn downward.
I bought a Toshiba laptop 10 years ago for $300 and it had a Celeron processor and 2GB of RAM and 250GB HDD. It lasted 5 years and admittedly wasn't very fast and gave me problems. HDD failed and I had to replace it once. It was my first computer.
Then I bought my current Dell for the same price of $300 with i3 processor and 6GB of RAM and 500GB HDD and it's lasted me 5 years (so far) and has been everything I've ever wanted. Hasn't given me any problems at all. Quite a nice upgrade from the previous laptop.
So, I figure I should be able to spend $300 again after another 5 years and get something that would be at least as much better now as my Dell is over that old Toshiba since just as much time has passed. But the current $300 offerings are ironically worse than what were available 5 years ago when I got my Dell. Hard drive capacity has dropped from 500GB down to 120GB (admittedly is a SSD instead of HDD, but that's the only improvement), the RAM dropped from 6GB down to 4GB, the processor went from Intel i3 back to the same Celeron as my Toshiba had 10 years ago, and the screen size went from 15.6" down to 14".
Now that my current Dell laptop is 5 years old and I'm depending on it now more than ever, I'm getting rather concerned about what I'll be having to settle for if it broke down.
With the current shortage of computer chips and other electronic parts, it got me to wondering if computers have increased in price over what they were before the shortage, or if technology in general is taking a turn downward.