A major Japanese PC and electronics store is pleading with customers to sell their old PC gear. “As a favor, if you buy a new one, please sell your gaming PC to our company,” begged the X-account of Sofmap Gaming in Akihabara, the Electric Town district of Tokyo (machine translation, h/t PC-Watch). The store shared a photo of some almost barren shelves, presumably taken at its triple-floor retail establishment.
Moreover, the company underlined that it wasn’t going to be fussy. “Whether it's a gaming desktop or a laptop, or even a regular non-gaming one, we pretty much buy any PC...”
These are clearly the words of a PC retailer facing consumer demand that it just can’t meet. We reported on Akihabara store trying to limit new RAM, SSD, and HDD sales back in November.
Old becomes gold
The memory supply crunch impacted the PC industry faster and more deeply than many would have predicted. The insatiable demand for memory from AI data center makers, with their deep circular-funded pockets, caused the first pricing jolts in the PC memory market. That’s reasonable, as consumers and industry both need to be fed product from the same big-three memory makers.
Consumers saw the first impacts on modern DDR5 pricing. Some DDR5 kits, if you can find them in stock, like this Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-5200 16GB (2x8GB) on Amazon is now $235. That price is more than 3.5X what it cost last October ($66).
However, there remains some hope that DDR4 pricing and availability, thanks to old stocks and upgraders already having DIMMs, could provide a safe haven for continued PC building. This perception even seems to permeate PC component makers, with more DDR4-supporting motherboards being manufactured, plus hints about new processors for DDR4 platforms.
However, we are continuing to feel RAM crunch aftershocks. Prices of pre-built PCs were the next market affected. Graphics cards with more generous VRAM quotas are also strongly rumored to be facing constraints. We should at least expect a price rise for GPU-restocks, with next-gen GPUs rumored to be delayed…
Now, underlined by this Japan retail report, it even seems like stocks of old used PCs are being snapped up by consumers.
How old is too old?
Of course, some old PCs are too old for retailers like Sofmap, even during today’s PC drought. We’d expect retailers that dabble in used PCs for non-enthusiast users to limit their purchases to DDR4 platforms, with hardware support that slots above the Windows 11 minimum requirements (Intel 8th Gen, AMD Ryzen 2000).
There’s an entirely different market for really old PCs, though. Vintage computers of certain eras have been increasingly pricey for quite a long time now. I was in Japan this time last year and astonished by the bountiful supplies of old PCs at used electronics retailers like Hard-Off. Hopefully, these computing gems (see the above picture), many of which live in the awkward zone between vintage and modern, will remain plentiful and affordable for PC retro-fans and tinkerers alike.
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