There are a lot of large tech companies that most of HN has never heard about that completely dominate entire segments.
Q2 is forecasted to be negative, partly because of RAM prices like you said, but for the most part this is something that only price sensitive nerds care about. Broadcom sells a ton of server chips. Server sales are up 30% vs last year so I highly doubt they're desperate to use their allocation
I thought of PCs second since most chip manufacturers make some thing or another that goes into them (Broadcom probably more than Qualcomm), and yes it's very suprising that PC sales don't seem to be down yet.
> the full-year 2026 [PCD] outlook has been revised to −10.4% year-over-year
because
> erosion of consumer purchasing power amid regional inflation and currency volatility in many key markets, compounded by memory and storage shortages that are proving more severe than anticipated in the previous forecast cycle.
The positive Q1 YoY growth
> was largely the product of pull-forward demand, as both consumer and commercial buyers accelerated purchases ahead of anticipated price increases and limited product availability.
The idea that only nerds care about the cost of things is... absurd.
For hardware purchases, laypeople may go about it the other way from what nerds would do: instead of deciding what they need in terms of computing power and memory, and then finding a cheap offer for that, they just decide how much they want to spend, and then buy a device at that price point irrespective of its performance characteristics. If you shop like this, and would have purchased anything but a rock-bottom low-end device two years ago, prices have remained stable.