Despite continued economic gloom, anecdotal evidence indicates that PC buyers purchased more high-end desktop models in the final three months of 2001 than in recent quarters, pointing to a mini-renaissance in the PC lifestyle.
Many consumers have been purchasing desktops with memory allotments of 256MB or more and hard drive sizes of 60GB to 80GB or even more. The buyers often paired those features with flat-panel displays--which doubled in sales in 2001--wireless networking equipment, and DVD recordable drives. At retail, sales of notebooks, more expensive than desktops, are also on the rise.
"Defying all expectation and gravity, our average price for consumer desktops went up in the fourth quarter" by about 6 percent, said Mike Winkler, executive vice president of Compaq Computer's global business units. "The people buying today are buying up. Part of it is a more sophisticated buyer, but part of it is also people who are getting into applications such as (digital) photos and video editing."
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