Fry's has become sad. At least around here, the store still exists but there's nothing in it. The company still says they're in business, but it's hard to believe. I'm half expecting hobos to start moving in while the lights are still on.
I used to sometimes shop for some electronic components there, but I noticed that the component section started to shrink and get moved, and they stopped restocking anything. I stopped bothering when I had a couple disappointing shopping trips. Ordering online isn't as much fun but at least they have stuff.
A few years ago Fry's electronics section was like Radio Shack might have been in the 1970s or 80s. Now they're rapidly becoming as useless as Radio Shack was in the 2000s.
Fry's started in the Silicon Valley catering to electronics engineers and the booming PC industry. Now they sell dishwashers. Or maybe nothing at all, I haven't checked in a while.
A relative recently built a hackintosh after his work got shut down by the virus. He needed it to keep up with video editing jobs he started getting. He had some trouble finding the parts available to buy, so I'm guessing prices could have been higher as a result. It was still a lot cheaper than an equivalent "real" Mac, and I haven't heard of any issues with it yet.
I don't keep up with the latest prices personally. I still use 6-10 year old hardware, and I don't keep up with the latest games other than some occasional undemanding "indie" type games. The requirement of modern PCs to run Windows 10, and the annoyance of UEFI that I've thus far avoided having to live with, have both deterred me from taking any interest in a new PC that I don't need.
A few years from now maybe I'll upgrade to something a few years newer, but it won't be new.
I bought a new laptop in 2018, but it was one of the last ones that could be coerced into running Windows 7, and that's what I did with it.
It's interesting to me how ATIAMD and nVidia have lost the market segmentation they used to maintain between gaming and professional video cards. Gaming cards are routinely used for profitable ventures now, which is the biggest reason their prices went crazy a few years ago.
People used to complain about the feature nerfing that kept gaming cards from being used to make money, but that strategy did serve a purpose. It broadened the market for a given chip design, improving economy of scale while still protecting the higher prices that professionals were willing to pay for a fully-enabled card.
When everybody uses the same cards, the prices converge somewhere in between, float further upward as economy of scale is lost, and casual gamers start buying Playstations.