I’m not sure how much.
For our customers, it started with the price-gouging of HDDs for a couple of years. (We just saw Seagate 3Tb for $109 this past weekend, and our customers purchased many dozens.)
Memory is still noticeably high, but there’s an excuse because SSDs compete with RAM for the raw materials these days. Something like, “Silicon doesn’t grow on trees, y’know” is being bandied about.
While they may share the same raw materials, no one ever talks about RAM dying a natural death due to ‘number of Reads/Writes’, however.
I think the negativity that Win8 has earned is indeed a factor. One thing we didn’t see - until lately - is customers saying, “I’ll wait for the SP1 or Point-One release.” I know our customers are openly resistant to the Start Screen forcing all Apps to go thru Ballmer’s pocketbook. And that’s the direction that 8.1 is still force-feeding the market.
The last two weeks’ of Microsoft meetings apparently were filled with listening opportunities that included, “We don’t care if Microsoft gives more $5-per-App opportunities for retrograde services - we sell large-dollar programs and our customers do not want to pay Ballmer for those.”
Listening is a nice lip-service phrase. Will they listen to fanboi troll-polls or the ka-ching of cash?