Don't buy now, pay later

WITH JUST 31 shopping days until Christmas, 2004 will soon be on top of us. What do we have to look forward to? Well I'm not to sure to be honest. As always we will have the usual speed bumps on various products and the odd product launch which will be touted to us by PR people as the 'next big thing'. But what will we see which will really make a difference to our lives?

We will continue to see better integration of computers within the home and the office, and not just in the conventional PC form. I believe that we will see more telecommuting and more dependency on computers within the work place. That's been happening for the past few years.

I also believe that we may well see a slow down in the adoption of new technology in 2004. I would like to think that consumers are becoming better educated about what they need and want, rather than what sales staff tell them they need. I have to say I am as yet unable to tell you that a member of PC World's sales staff has told me that I need 64-bit computing.

In 2004, we will see the launch of Prescott from Intel: this part is going to be launched to try and beat AMD's Athlon 64. We will also see AMD's bold change to the socket configuration, while Intel will ditch the socket completely. But I don't believe that either of these will make any real difference to our lives. CPUs are fast enough for mainstream. The current top of the line microprocessors will get cheaper and thus we can all have 3GHz machines when we really only need Pentium III 500s.

So, what else do we have to look forward to? We will see PCI-Express launched with its bi-directional buses and different widths available, oh and DDR2 the next 'Intel' RAM initiative. We have to ask ourselves how much of this will make a real difference and how much is just a new marketing ploy. Yes, it is a new technology, and yes it will make a difference in about two years' time when there is a need for it, but do we need it now? Does the consumer need it? Or will it be forced upon us by the steely OEMs who just want a different label to stick on their 'beige' box?

The one battle which seems inevitable is between the Red and Green companies, both of which will be releasing their next generation parts and spending many hours telling us that they're much better than their competitor's parts. Then they will tell us that their competitors are cheats and don't do it properly. That's even though they are not 'slagging them off', merely trying to 'make them play fair'. You have to ask yourself whether your graphics card is fast enough? I know mine is. [You won't be wanting any samples at all then, David? Ed.]

Call me cynical, but when will this growth in the IT segment slow down? Why do people think they need a newer and faster PC? Isn't that 1GHz Pentium III enough for most people? I know that I could do my job on it, which includes my daily Internet browsing, email, writing in M$ Word, and listening to music. I think that it is part of the mind place that people constantly believe that we need something faster, rather than something with more functionality.

If I asked you all what has made your life easier in 2003 what would you say? I can tell you now the one thing which has made a huge difference to my life in 2003, and that is broadband. For £20 a month I now have a high speed connection to my home/office from which I can download the huge PDF attachments from the PR people, normally about the new technology which is supposed to change our lives but probably doesn't.

If you don't want the latest, greatest, and most expensive, then wait until the next iteration is out and then buy the previous one at a cut down price. You know it makes sense. µ