The computer industry seems to have hit a wall.
A wall made of what, though? Here's my theory:
Computers have to be bigger and faster to run bigger and faster applications. But the applications are so bloated already that they can't get any bigger. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are pretty much at maximum density, and would explode if new features were added. And a decent P4 is more than enough to run them both at the same time.
Somebody probably noticed that a few years ago, and started hyping video and music manipulation. Cd burners, cd rippers, dvd burners, dvd rippers, music library programs, id3 editors, transcoders/converters, media players that play everything, etc. And where are they headed? Dual-layer dvd recorders are dying on the shelves, since the only reasonable use for the damn things is illegal. Ripping and burning dvds and cds is legal, but only for certain applications, and the applications the average person wants them for ("borrowing" movies and music from friends) are very illegal.
So where does this leave us? If you've got a Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM and a dvd/cd burner/player, then you've pretty much got everything you need. There's not a lot out there on the consumer market that will make your system work at full capacity. Now, science people and digital filmmakers need multiple TBs of storage and TBs of RAM and processor clusters for their applications, and those markets are still doing big business. But consumer hardware and consumer software requirements have pretty much peaked together.
In short, Dell isn't selling many computers because not too many people need new computers.
That's my take on it, anyway. And if I'm right, US politics won't make much difference. The American economy lives on hi-dollar consumer purchases. First it was suburban houses, then cars, then refrigerators, then TVs, then home audio systems, and now computers. Somebody is going to have to come up with something to sell pretty fast, or we're going to hit a pretty serious recession.
