Intel Corp (INTC)

[Not a Short]

300 mhz? Why would you compare anything to 300 mhz?* The cheapest processor on pricewatch in any volume is a Athlon 1700+ (or Duron 1.3 Ghz if you call that volume).

I literally have a 350 mhz intel processor sitting on a shelf doing nothing, I see my company give away PCs to charity on a regular basis. But I don't see 300 mhz being an average pc.

I'll give you the point that increased computing power helps now, and still will in the future (I know I'm personally pleased every time I gain a few hundred mhz or so out of an upgrade).

Given that faster is better, I'd still say that it is moving towards a commodity situation for many.

For a machine running Win 98SE, Office 97 pro, Outlook 98 or outlook express 5/6 (which is still a very common business setup) you don't gain much when you go over 1 ghz, 256 MB ram. I personally would rather have a PIII than a P4, especially if it means using SDRAM instead of RDRAM. The TCO is much lower on the PIII SDRAM box.

Outside of a power supply or MB going south what reason is there to upgrade a PC on an end users desk if that person doesn't notice the difference between the PIII 600 on their desk and the P233 on their neibors desk?

In reality the software configuration affects the overall speed of a pc more than it should (gator/GAIN,webshots,kazaa,new.net,commet cursor,weatherbug,and a billion other adbased items get loaded at startup or as a service and it slows down a pc considerably)

I've seen 400-600 mhz machines that will boot to the desktop in a few seconds and 1 ghz machines that take minutes. But if both are clean builds the end user doesn't notice that much difference.

So long as Dell is making systems that are slightly underclocked, with relaxed timings you aren't going to get the end effect that INTC and AMD are working so hard to provide us. The end user sees this lack of improvement (as MB/BIOS settings and new OSs mask the increased capabilities of a new processor) and they spread the word of mouth that it isn't worth it to buy a new computer.

In the end the number of Joes that don't know anything about computers outnumber the people who are techies, buy for status, or buy for true need. So if you are going to sell to the Joes you are going to end up commoditizing your product.

*as I rambled I realized why you would compare to a 300 mhz, that is right about the level of the bottom rung of pcs waiting to be upgraded/given away. But once you get to the PIIIs as being your bottom machine the situation changes The PIII design is solid, it has legs, won't be over the hill until either x86-64 and/or some other 64 bit OS gains serious mindshare.