Price of PCs as Vista nears 476

Well, your justifications are pretty wide-ranging, but they bring up a couple of points:

1) PC prices will always fall, no matter what. Buy the machine when you need it, and don't worry about how much less it's going to be next month.

2) Many people will let someone else be the pioneers. I steered my clients away from XP until SP2 was released, and anyone who values stability over fancy new features ("Oooh, animated icons, wow!") will probably do the same. Retailers aren't stupid, they'll allow XP and Vista to be options for something like a year, as they did with the

3) While there might be performance issues, and tweaks thereof, many of the laptops sold today will work just fine with Vista.

4) Dell is moving towards AMD, so the "Intel-Only" argument is probably a red herring.

5) Many consumers don't know an XP from a Vista from a frog, they'll go to the store and buy whatever the salesman can talk them into.

6) I suspect that 32-64 bit is also a rathole, laptops seem to be going the multi-core route for better performance rather than more bits.