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The story
Prices for PC parts — memory, graphics cards, CPUs, you name it — just keep climbing. The thread kicked off with a post griping that “everything except power supplies has gone through insane price hikes,” and it spiraled into a debate over whether sales are actually falling as a result. Citing data from research firm MM Research Institute, posters noted that domestic PC shipments for fiscal 2026 are projected to drop 37.8% year-on-year to 11.23 million units, with the decline blamed on a rebound from last year’s rush to replace PCs before Windows 10 support ended, plus soaring memory prices. Meanwhile, some argued “CPUs are at rock bottom” and “AMD’s graphics cards are staying reasonable,” showing just how differently each part category is being felt in people’s wallets.
What people said
I was paying attention enough to grab a Switch 2 and a Meta Quest, but figured a new PC could wait — so I cheaped out with a 1TB SSD, and now I seriously regret it
People with money really do have money
All hail Wilds
Play any cross-play online game and you'll feel how outnumbered you are
They're ¥10,000–20,000 cheaper than at launch
The 9800X3D alone went for ¥120,000 at one point and now it's ¥55,000
Don't talk out of your ass if you don't even know the market 🙄
They extended support to next October, so that bought me some time
Feels like prices went up after XP support ended too, if I remember right
Probably shows up on the Steam hardware survey before long
That's the whole point of PCs and smartphones as a category
Hearing "PC, PC" hyped nonstop on the console-war boards (ゲハ, a 5ch hardware/industry forum) makes it feel mainstream, but it really isn't
Think about it for a second — there just aren't that many people willing to drop hundreds of thousands of yen on what's basically a toy for playing games
If my current PC breaks, I'm going back to the library too
Welcome back, Showa-era life. Goodbye, Reiwa (Japan's old vs. current imperial eras)
> Research firm MM Research Institute (Minato, Tokyo) announced on the 28th that domestic PC shipments for fiscal 2026 are projected to fall 37.8% year-on-year to 11.23 million units. The decline reflects a pullback after last year's replacement-demand surge, along with soaring memory prices, among other factors.
Like the article says, companies replaced a ton of PCs when Win10 support ended
2025 is said to have been up 32.6% year-on-year, so unless you compare against two years ago
the noise is way too big to make sense of
"I'm in middle school now, buy me a phone — it has to be an iPhone!" → ¥200,000
"We've got programming class at school, buy me a PC too!" → ¥300,000
"I want a Switch 2!" → ¥60,000 + games × number of kids
Game consoles you can easily cut back on
And honestly that's becoming the trend lately
If your PC isn't running this, don't call it high-end
I wanted to move up from the B650, but…
Went with a B850 but picked AsRock, so now I keep checking my CPU temps now and then
Should've just gone with MSI or Gigabyte
It's all thanks to AI, really
Anyone can draw art now, chat with a bot, get research summarized, even make games
The only ones struggling are the anti-AI holdouts stuck in the past
Outside of just generating an image or video and being satisfied with the finished product, we're running into "no PC powerful enough to actually use AI," and it's a real problem
To do stuff like "whoa, Astra can build a whole game from one line of instructions," you need a beastly PC that can actually put that beastly AI to work
Monitors are about to go up in price too
Around 20%, so budget models won't be hit much, but almost everything else will
Gotta thank China and Korea for that
CPUs are at rock bottom
And Radeon graphics cards are keeping prices reasonable too
https://www.nichepcgamer.com/archives/post-132323.html
AMD: "We're raising prices! (^_^)"
And it's not just PCs — in cars, motorcycles, home theater/audio, cameras, watches, and other enthusiast markets, there's no shortage of "romance cannon" products designed purely to get idiots to blow their cash.
Idiots buy them, happily show them off, and revel in it. That's how the economy keeps turning. Compared to those hobbies, console gaming is actually a fairly cheap pastime.
So the best strategy is to flatter idiots into overspending. Side note: during the American Gold Rush, the ones who made the most money weren't the dreamers chasing a fortune — it was the people selling them pickaxes and jeans.
What do you mean "how" — it's probably just the money they're not spending on cigarettes and booze going into it instead
You don't hear much about used high-end parts reeking of cigarette smoke, after all
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
PC market price trends are hard to read because several factors are at play at once. Following the end of Windows 10 support in October 2025, businesses in particular front-loaded their replacement purchases — and fiscal 2026 shipments are projected to drop sharply year-on-year as that rush fades. Where the thread split was over whether price hikes are actually driving people to hold off buying: some parts, like CPUs, have gotten cheaper than at launch, while others, like memory and motherboards, keep climbing, so it’s not something you can sum up in one line. A point readers can easily misread is that while the year-on-year numbers look like a “sharp drop,” the prior year itself had spiked due to a demand surge — and as posters in the thread pointed out, without comparing against two years back, “the noise is too big” to see the real picture. Growing demand for high-performance PCs to run AI workloads was also cited as one factor pushing parts prices higher.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Aren’t PC sales dropping with everything except power supplies going through insane price hikes? Every price hike right now is just unreasonable.”
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