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It's been more than four years since Fry's closed. I can't believe it took this long to get something better than Best Buy and bigger than Central Computers, in the middle of Silicon Valley of all places!

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I get the feeling the real Fry's died long before that. It seemed like it was going downhill when I left the area about 18 years ago. Less parts, less tools, less test equipment, more packaged gadgets.

Yeah Fry's was pretty awful.

Fry's had an interesting vibe and felt you time traveled to the 90s, but my gosh they were so weird. They searched your bag on the way out. Microcenter is a godsend although it'll be hard to beat B&H with Payboo card.

I only use B&H site for checking general prices or reviews, as they won't stop discriminating people.

A discrimination lawsuit almost every year since 2009.

https://www.thephoblographer.com/2024/07/09/bh-photo-lawsuit...

Not really familiar with their internal affairs but as a retailer they have been nothing but great in my experience as the customer. In the end, any large company will at some point be accused of certain things, rightly or wrongly, and I am willing to bet larger retailers simply have an easier time paying off the complaints before we hear about them. I mean, the primary alternative for me would be Amazon, which won’t win any prizes from me in employee affairs dimension, I can tell you that.

I think a lot of that was following what sold. If nobody is buying these things at Fry's, it doesn't make sense for them to stock them.

IMHO, there was a drop in good deals around the time they got rid of the purchaser who was doing the embezzleing (2008), and also new stores started opening with 'boring corporate store' theme ('new' sunnyvale store, vegas). If I'm gonna be at a boring corporate store and not getting good deals, why bother?

Then there was the year? or so of circling the drain when there was some sort of credit problem and they tried to switch from owning inventory to a consignment model and most of their vendors weren't interested so they had no inventory.

TBH, I've been hoping they make a Wolf of Wall Street style movie about the store. There was obviously kooky stuff going on business wise, and that means there could be an entertaining story.

Agreed; went into Fry's, off Lawrence?, just before it closed. Visited area on and off again over the years since. Central Computer did seem to have what I needed for that moment, but the area seemed barren, was simply not the same, and especially after experiencing Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted?, Anchor, Computer Literacy, et al. in the late 1980s and 90s.

Hear hear. I guess we still have Anchor.

We had a Microcenter that closed in 2012, took them that long to return.

PC hardware is a competitive and margin tight business, especially due to online sales. At the same time, the inventory can be very expensive on the books. It makes the calculus for viability of a physical store quite challenging. It's why Microcenter has relatively few stores for the US.

So true. Fry's is still missed every day.

This is a good replacement, though.

I've been happy with Central Computer. Three machines and two repairs in ten years.

Who in Silicon Valley uses actual computers and not something in the cloud? Do any start ups use actual hardware that you'd get at some place like MicroCenter? Don't they just get handed shiny new Apple hardware (something from HP/Dell if they're on a budget) to interface with the cloud?

I think many of the employees have gaming rigs at home and would buy parts there.

You'd be surprised by how many "tech" people have no clue on about how to build a rig, nor have any willingness to learn.

Youre not wrong.

I have a pc with 24GB 3090 card capable of running LLMs locally, but our electricity costs make API calls much more reasonable.

Even gaming -- streaming geforce now is cheaper than ammortizing cost of power + hardware over time

For my personal use, I'll take the hit in cost for the additional control that owning the hardware gives me. Even less restrictive things like blocking sideloading are unacceptable to me.

Cost break down please

The store has lots of other tech enthusiast stuff, like a huge selection of 3D printers.

And a full aisle of electronics / hobbyist gear, including decent soldering stations, fluke gear, tons of components, and a good smattering of SparkFun and Adafruit's catalog.

They have great small business machines and more importantly, everything you need without waiting for amazon. Their in-house prebuilt brand PowerSpec have great prices for the hardware and work nicely whether you go for a gaming version or office build.

silicon valley-ite here: we have normal gaming machines and linux boxen too …

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