'In 10 years of tracking retail CPU sales, I have never seen such a steep decline,' says one tech channel after staring at the grim figures
Anyone who does a lot of data analysis will know that the longer you collect data for, the easier it becomes to spot trends. Sometimes, though, a pattern is so stark that you don't need to be a data expert to spot it, and in the case of German retailer Mindfactory, its CPU sales figures tell you everything you need to know about PCs right now.
The numbers I'm about to show you come courtesy of YouTube channel TechEpiphany, via its X account, where it routinely collates and posts weekly sales numbers for CPUs, GPUs, and motherboards. The data mostly refers to Mindfactory, but TechEpiphany does similar tracking for Amazon and others.
Anyway, the above chart shows the number of AMD and Intel CPUs sold at the German store, starting week 3 of this year, up to week 15. In some cases, successive weeks have identical sales, but that's because TechEpiphany has posted a value for a group of weeks, and I've taken the average weekly figure from that.
When I first saw the numbers in raw form, it didn't strike me as being particularly bad in any way, but once visualised in a graph, the drop in sales is pretty stark. So much so that it drove TechEpiphany to say, "In 10 years of tracking retail CPU (and related) sales, I have never seen such a steep decline."
Now, I'm only showing you Mindfactory's data, but I'm sure the tech tracker has other sources of data to make them make such a statement. Not that this will come as a surprise to any PC enthusiast who regularly checks out the prices of components or follows tech news, because no matter how great today's CPUs, GPUs, and motherboards are, increasingly fewer people are considering doing a full upgrade.
The outrageous price tags that DRAM kits and SSDs currently sport are a colossal barrier: You're looking at spending at least $160 at Amazon for a basic 1 TB NVMe drive, and should you be feeling like throwing caution to the wind and sticking 32 GB of snappy DDR5-6000 into your rig, you'll be handing $380 to Newegg for the privilege.
Add them together (i.e. $540), and you have a sum of money that's actually enough to buy an RTX 5060 graphics card, with a Ryzen 5 7600X taped to its heatsink.
So, naturally, PC shoppers are making the sensible decision to forgo doing a full platform upgrade until memory and storage prices come back down into the realms of affordability. Put it like this: 12 months ago, you could buy a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD and a 32 GB kit of fast DDR5 for less than $200. Sadly, it'll probably be more than 12 months before we see that kind of price again.