Intel Shortages Inflating PC Prices

To be fair, PCs were already selling at lower prices to help stave off the move toward mobile research and away from traditional computers, experts say. "They're cheap enough already," says Kim Caughey Forrest, vice-president and senior equity at Fort Pitt Capital in Pittsburgh, Penn. "Tablets are popping up on consumer's radar. PC demand among consumers had been declining."

The hard drive shortage might as well be a boon for alternative storage technologies just as solid-state drives like the ones used in the MacBook Air, as then as cloud-based computing, de Grandpre says. "Cloud storage is on the whole dirt cheap," he says, "so consumers can get by on smaller hard drives and use the cloud to store files and media."