You may not like working on your smartphone. Indeed, you probably aren’t even crazy about a laptop. No, for you, it’s all about the personal computer, waiting at home for you on your desk for you to buckle down and get the job done.
You can still have that PC, but the companies making them want it to be clear that if you desire a replacement, you’re going to pay.
Indeed, you’re probably going to pay even more than you think you’re paying. Vlad Savov did some pricing for The Verve. He reports that Microsoft offers the “$2,999 Surface Studio.” Except you’re probably going to be shelling out a good deal more than three grand, since it “scales up to $4,199 when you juice up the RAM to 32GB and the storage to 2TB.”
Why is this happening? Savov has a theory, feeling that Apple and Microsoft have “both come to terms with the fact that people are simply never going to buy PCs — whether in desktop or laptop form, running Windows or macOS — in the old numbers that they used to.” That said, they’d still love to keep making roughly the same amount of money that they did in the PC glory years, so “when you can’t have growth in total sales, the logical move is to try and improve the other multiplier in the profit calculation: the per-unit price and built-in profit margin.”
On the plus side: PCs are once again becoming a luxury item, like they were in the beginning of the computing revolution. So when you have one out on your desk, it says to the world: “I may be a little old fashioned, but I can afford to be that way.”
To read more on this trend, click here.
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