But anyway, you might have noticed lately that the clamor behind the whole "thin client" revolution proved to be about as believable as your average TV sitcom's laugh track (that is, unless you're Larry Ellison or a member of his ilk, in which case a laugh track would be appropriate for some of the speeches these people give at the various trade shows, and not for the so-called intentionally funny bits either... Just ask Bill Gates, who had the good fortune to have the Win98 beta he was demoing to a large audience bluescreen on him as he tried to attach a scanner to it.) Now no longer regarded as any major threat to the industry status quo as it was once hyped up to be, the hidden costs behind such a device ended up being insufficiently hidden, and nobody is buying the hype anymore. What has been realized is the fact that for most companies, about all that anyone would really be able to do with one of the things is to go surf the web, an activity that most companies out there realize there's too much of happening on company time. In addition, even if some of these systems can run Windows, for a large corporate LAN, the servers needed to run Windows on hundreds of these things would be ridiculously expensive, and most likely would cost more than it would take to outfit the same LAN with low cost, full-function PCs.
So now that this trend seemed to last about as long as the careers of the New Kids on the Block (No, I haven't tried to get in here either), the industry superegos have regrouped their forces for another offensive, which has now become collectively known as the purported rise of the "sub-$1,000 PC". The gist of this whole thing is that one takes your average, off-the-shelf PC, uses the cheapest possible components and basically cuts as many corners as they can possibly get away with and still have the thing work, then smack a $999 price tag on the thing and hope people buy it. Obviously, it appears the "rich but clueless" target market which they seemed to be shooting for before wasn't really paying off all that well, so now they have to focus their efforts on the not-so-rich but clueless market to sell stripped-down PCs at knockdown prices. Sure, there are valid reasons for one to purchase such a PC, as long as you don't expect too much. Of course, to say these machines are "entry level" would be a gross understatement, as many of them are lacking such standard features as cache, and often have little or no room for future expansion. And a PC like this will be nowhere near adequate for all but the least resource intensive games on the market today. Basically, what we've got here is a slew of Yugos being dumped onto the proverbial Information Superhighway of computing (now there's a buzzword you almost never hear anymore,mentioned mostly by people who want to make it look like they know how to use the latest buzzwords or in a not-so-nice sense.)
So far, about the only noticable effect this has had on the industry as a whole is to provide it with a good excuse for just about everything they can think of. Intel has used the whole "cheap PC" bit as an excuse to create the Celeron chip, a variation of the Pentium II without the cache and other such stuff to make it fast, therefore making it cheap. PC manufacurers throughout the industry are using this as an excuse as to why they seem to be losing a lot of money lately. Even failing Internet magazines choose the sub-$1,000 PC as their prefered excuse for folding out of existence, claiming that everyone is too busy cutting corners to advertise, so their CEOs then go off and write books about how everything is someone else's fault. By all accounts, it would appear that the whole sub-$1,000 PC spiel isn't doing much for anyone's bottom line, but thos would appear to be quite a boon for the industry's spin-doctor contingent.
Of course, when one cuts corners on the machines they're churning out, one can't expect these machines to be of top-of-the-line calibre, or given the rate that CPUs are getting faster (in case nobody's noticed, the 350 and 400 MHz Pentium II processors got released at about the same time as these wimpy Celeron chip thingies.... Sounds like something a vegetarian would eat.) in fact, cheap components mean that these machines often wimp out on some of the most common household applications of computers: games. These systems often lag far behind computers of a similar CPU class in benchmark tests. Even the addition of a 3D-accelerator card (if possible, which isn't the case on some of these systems) doesn't have much of an effect on the performance of these systems.
The bottom line is that you get what you pay for, and this holds true in just about any industry you look at, and you certainly aren't getting a whole lot when you buy a sub-$1,000 PC. Of course, there are some users (beginners, mostly) who don't need much more than a working computer right out of the box, and for them, a sub-$1,000 PC should be fine... until Junior gets bored one of these days and decides to fire up Quake II. Then all of a sudden, that machine that looked so attractive in the store has now become a fly drowning in a jar of January molasses. Forst of all, the main complaint is that people complain that computers cost too much, which leads to stripped-down systems that don't cost as much, upon which people start to complain that the cheap computers are too slow. The computers start getting faster again, but the price creeps up rather conspicuously when this happens. What we have here appears to be yet another iteration of one of those things that people like to call a vicious cycle. There are plenty of these out there to be found if you know where to look. For example, the whole computer industry as it stands about now can be described in one of these. Since I'm too lazy to type it up or even go open the file and cut/paste it in, go read the about page for this site for this particular bit of info. The problem is that if it weren't for this cycle making a mess of things, we'd all still probably be taking three hours to load C/PM in on punchcards every morning, although I'm sure that someone would have figured out how to get a massively multiplayer game of Pong going on this primitive setup somehow. Ever notice how the only reason anyone ever makes any sort of significant technological advance anymore is to make faster, cooler looking games? Too bad they managed to leave gameplay back in about 1985 or so....