Why we are paying the same price for the same laptop hardware as 5 years ago

July 6, 2016

Readers of MyGaming will be familiar with our weekly deals articles.

While the quality of deals may differ from week to week, typically you know that you will be getting a better deal on a TV, console, or tablet than you would on the same hardware a year ago.

Not so for laptop hardware, which truly seems to have stagnated over the last couple of years, offering the same or incrementally better hardware for the exact same price (and sometimes more).

The problem isn’t unique to South Africa however, reports Laptopmag, as the world’s laptop market appears to be in a very serious rut.

The reason midrange laptops are doing so poorly is that most of them aren’t appreciably better than the old models they’re meant to replace.

Four or five years ago, a typical midrange laptop had an Intel Core i3 (or maybe Core i5) CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a 1366 x 768 screen. Today, most laptops in that price range still have awful, low-res screens, though now some have touch capability.

The same applies to the mechanical harddrives, the marginally better i3 and i5 CPUs and the cheap, bulky plastic case that never seems to offer “more”.

That’s not to say the laptop is dead however. Both the low and high-end markets have made significant strives in recent years as they see how much they can cram into sub R2,000 and R15,000+ notebooks respectively.

So why are mid-range laptops offering so little to consumers?

According to Stephen Baker, NPD’s lead consumer hardware analyst, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to keep their margins high.

“There are extra costs in premium products around build, design and inventory, so the OEMs need to make more money to cover those.”

“Reducing prices at premium levels is unlikely to generate enough incremental new sales or trade-ups into those products to offset the lost margin dollars absorbed in cutting prices.”

The answer is simple then, if manufacturers really want to sell more laptops, they need to provide better incentives for consumers to upgrade their old systems.