It's a buyer's market, even though there was speculation that a September earthquake in Taiwan would create a shortage of certain chips, forcing PCmakers to raise prices or trim features. Some companies might reduce the amount of random access memory in higher-end systems, Baker said. Dell Computer, for example, cut back some system configurations last month to 64 megabytes of RAM instead of 128. Still, buyers thinking about a computer this holiday season will get a lot more for their dollar than they would have a year ago. Even if the prices are appealing, buying a computer isn't a painless experience.
Consumers have to slog through a jungle of technical jargon.
I wasn't interested in just having a little word processor or balancing my checkbook. Consumers won't have to settle for the traditional beige box, as more manufacturers have followed Apple's eye-catching lead with the iMac. Lower prices are not limited to PCs. Kuykendall, who is disabled and lives in Belleair Bluffs, considers himself a relative computing novice, even though he had some computer experience in the '80s when he worked for an architectural engineering firm. He didn't do much shopping, just checked newspaper ads and listened to friends and family, who recommended Gateway, one of the pioneers of mail-order computer sales.