It's the fact that most apps only run on one thread. I'm not saying the present apps need to be multi-threaded, but think about it. We've reached a sort of barrier where since about 2005 or so, the limit for any one core has been the same for a while, and probably won't change much for another few years.

Recently, though, we've(programmers, and a sub-set of the tech-heads, with me being a perma-noob tech-head) discovered some awesome uses for graphics cards that don't involve games, and in many cases don't even involve graphics. It won't be long until some of this stuff trickles down to the rest of you. At the moment they're beginning to find new, faster ways to process video and pictures(mostly pictures right now) which will vastly speed up things like HD video processing.

Give it another few years and I think people will become much enamored with the new abilities of their computers. :)

Oh, and for the other uses, google "distributed computing GPU". Charity begins in the home gets a whole new meaning, lol.

Damn Jon, well said. Ditto your comments and this one of my own.

In the manufacturing business, this situation often means finished products are simply piling up in warehouses because supply vastly exceeds demand. Apple did this for a time in the early years (1980's I think) and it took a serious agonizing reappraisal of tactics to help fix the problem. That and a fortuitous increase in demand worldwide.

... it's because many consumers and IT departments have figured out that you don't need a new computer every year anymore. I have a 5 year old Pentium D that does just fine and will continue to do fine for some time. The real issue is that the needs of consumers haven't increased a great deal and the hardware hasn't gotten much better. You can therefore keep the same basic machine for longer than ever before and just upgrade parts here and there (I've upgraded the video card in mine a couple of times over the years). The average user uses MS Office and surfs the net. You don't need a quad-core with 8GB of RAM for that and people have figured it out. It's nice to have the latest and greatest, but that's a luxury not a necessity and in this economy luxuries are the first things to go. Until the industry comes up with something truly innovative, sales won't pick up much.

They are counting ready made PCs from dell and ETC, while by now everyone and their grandmother knows its best to build, or have someone build your own.

Maybe they ought to count motherboard shipments and not PC shipments.