A thread on 5ch posed the question, “Do you really need ¥300,000 these days just to buy a decent computer?” — sparking debate over soaring prices for memory, CPUs, and even USB flash drives.
Some argued that ¥100,000-something is plenty if you’re not gaming, while others countered that ¥300,000 is the real floor if you want to run AI workloads or just want a smooth experience. The discussion ranged widely, touching on the weak yen, real-world prices at retailer Dospara, and used off-lease corporate PCs as a budget option.
Kids these days just don't use PCs anymore.
Prices are climbing, but ¥100,000 will still get you by.
If you're not gaming, there's no need to build something expensive.
Not sure where the line for 'decent' is, but if you want a laptop with high-end specs, ¥300,000 becomes the floor.
If it's not for gaming, you can find one for around ¥100,000.
Young people just buy Snapdragon (ARM-based) laptops instead.
Smartphone-only little punks be like: 'I've used a smartphone since I was a kid so I'm basically a tech genius lol'
If you don't game, a used corporate PC is plenty.
>>10
Is the licensing on those even legit?
Is the licensing on those even legit?
The threshold for expensing something as a business cost without depreciating it is now up to ¥400,000, right?
They kept telling us to upgrade to Win11, but Win10 support got extended by a ton.
Just get by with a tablet plus a physical keyboard.
Well, even before Windows 95, a PC that actually worked properly started around ¥300,000, so just think of it as going back to the old days.
You need at least 8GB of RAM minimum, or your browser alone will max it out.
PC prices have gotten so bad that Microsoft, on top of extending Win10 support, is also working hard to make Win11 usable with just 8GB of RAM. Fitting, since Microsoft — busy building data centers — is part of the reason semiconductor prices spiked in the first place.
>>18
They should've just done that from the start, honestly. Why's the OS itself hogging so much memory before you've even started working?
They should've just done that from the start, honestly. Why's the OS itself hogging so much memory before you've even started working?
Thanks to the memory price hikes, a decent laptop that'll last you a few years now starts around ¥200,000. And that's with no GPU — just an 8-core-ish CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD.
These days you're probably better off with a tablet plus a keyboard and mouse.
Want to replace my desktop with a BTO or custom build, but memory's roughly 3x the price now… what do I even do.
Did you know USB flash drives have shot up in price too? Ones that used to be under ¥2,000 are now almost ¥6,000.
If you can somehow sort out the memory with used parts, you could probably build something decent for around ¥100,000, but it really comes down to which graphics card you go with. Depends what you want to do with it.
Just hop between used off-lease corporate PCs.
You have to allocate memory to the integrated GPU too, so you'll want at least 16GB. Even the PS5 has 16GB. With 32GB you can do pretty much anything without stress.
Back in the day you could gauge performance roughly from the Pentium number, but I have no clue with CPUs these days.
There's a huge price gap between 16GB and 32GB of RAM.
The DDR5 32GB kit I bought on sale for ¥6,000 about a year and a half ago is going for around ¥80,000 now.
Well, I don't really use a PC for work anymore anyway, so it's fine by me — a smartphone covers most things. Still, I can't forgive whoever steered us into this excessive yen depreciation.
PCs have gotten more expensive, but I don't feel like performance has actually gone up to match.
If you're running AI stuff at home, you really do want a solid GPU and lots of memory, so I get why prices are up.
If you're not playing the newest games, ¥100,000 should do it.
Got a refurbished Let's Note off Amazon for under ¥50,000 and it runs great.
At Dospara you're looking at ¥180,000 plus ¥50,000-60,000 for an external GPU, and you're set.
Dospara's probably the cheapest — under ¥150,000 if 16GB of RAM is enough for you.
Memory prices have calmed down a bit compared to a while back, but now everyone's started hiking CPU prices instead. You can make do on memory by going DDR4 or even DDR3 worst case, but storage prices climbing too is kind of a pain. Probably safest to grab something used from a place like PC Konfuru and just buy whatever extra performance you actually need.
>>50
Cheap. Though I'd want a slightly better CPU.
Cheap. Though I'd want a slightly better CPU.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Do you really need ¥300,000 to buy a decent computer?“
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