I think people need to realize that the demand is just insane compared to normal CPU and GPU launches right now. Most of the entire modern world is working from home, or kids going to school from home, or young adults taking classes or meeting up with friends from home, all on computers. Computers that have probably not really been upgraded in years (if you look at the PC sales figures over the last several years). There was no need to upgrade because the systems worked well enough for their use cases. Most people were getting by with their phones for much of their personal needs. But along came this pandemic and now people need computers to do actual work in their homes again. Then need keyboards and displays and microphones and cams to perform presentations and attend video conference calls. They need screen real-estate for having documentation up as well as the presentation that is ongoing. They might need to compile applications, or debug code, or model a design in 3D.
These are things they would typically have done on their work computers and workstations, but for those that needed things more powerful than a laptop, those computers are most likely at their work, but they need something similar at home now in order to work from home. This has created a HUGE demand for new hardware. PCs are not dead as the media had been saying for years looking at PC sales and PC game sales. Quite simply, the issue was that the PCs people had were good enough, and thus they didn't need to upgrade them every 2-3 years like we did back in the 80's through 2000's. PCs became fast enough for most things people did, and having something faster didn't actually improve things enough to justify the new computer unless the old one actually broke. That is why sales had been declining. But with this forced change in what people need to do with their home PCs, we are seeing huge demand in needing to upgrade existing systems (or buy 2 or 3 or 4 for the home because both parents need to use one to work themselves and all the kids need their own to attend their school).
Its also why there are so many people posting in the networking forum asking how to expand their WiFi coverage or extend their networks. The demand is enormous for meeting the computing requirements of working from home, isolating from the rest of the world.
I am just glad I got my sister's home network up and running at the end of last year/early this year. And I am glad I got all the parts to upgrade my own network this year before it got really bad. This also gave me the excuse to finally setup my network with a look to long-term support/upgrade-ability (i.e. I can easily support my connection to my ISP if they ever start offering higher speeds than 1Gbe, like 10Gbe or even 40Gbe, with my core network switch and router supporting that capability).
Facebook
Twitter