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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

IMO those numbers are not directly comparable. You buy a PC when your old PC is getting too old; only a portion of the PC market will be buying PCs in a given month.

On the other hand, the iPad is a new and rapidly growing market segment.

In other words, one is a new growing market, and one is an older stable market. The numbers will be more comparable once the tablet market is stabilized.

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Also the Dell angle avoids every other PC manufacture. Dell is only ~13% of the market tops, the volume of PCs is 8 times what the iPad moves. Also, PCs are a maturing market and it's no longer necessary to upgrade every couple years, a 5 year old PC probably still works fine for most users.

DRAM issues are probably much more to do with 2GBs being enough for most users in combination with a lengthened upgrade cycle. Moores law would suggest that todays users would buy 8 to 16GB of DRAM which just hasn't materialized.

Moore's Law relates to transistor density on an IC. As far as I know there is no suggestion within Moore's Law that attempts in any way to predict consumer buying patterns or demand.

I'm not so sure you can disconnect Moore's Law from market demand. There is certainly no physical basis for Moore's Law. It is mainly an expression of the rate of capital investment and business profit cycles. It happens that spending the Moore's Law rate on R&D and new fabs approximately matches the profits needed to build the next cycle. If customers stopped needing more memory, for whatever reason, then the business investment cycle represented by Moore's Law would quickly come to a halt. Conversely, if there were a Manhattan Project style crash R&D effort that needed better memory chips, and lack of profit was no barrier, then the density could improve faster than Moore's Law for some time.

>Moores law would suggest that todays users would buy 8 to 16GB of DRAM which just hasn't materialized.

my half year old 4Gb laptop i'd buy with 8Gb at least. Yet they all still come with 4Gb (and its happening for something like 2 years already)

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