uh, if you think you are going to need a new computer in the next six months and you have money to buy it now, and you have been able to find it in stock someplace, go buy it now.
It is my actual, professional, real-life job to buy computers for businesses and right now that is basically impossible.
I found one computer that will kind-of work for someone who has been waiting on an order that WE'VE been waiting on from our vendor for a month and when I placed the order for that computer it was almost sold out. I don't even know if I'm going to get an email tomorrow saying that the order was cancelled due to stock imbalances.
My Lenovo rep sends me an inventory of what's in stock with the big resellers nationwide every two weeks. This shows that there were about 400 Lenovo Business desktops stocked through the whole of the US. There are normally at least a couple thousand split up among various vendors and part numbers.
This inventory is from a month ago, all of those part numbers are currently at approximately zero. When she sent me her inventory update last Friday it was all for chromebooks, no desktops or laptops.
I have to get monitors for an office, a total of 8. The main vendor I use was out of stock and so were two of the other ones I have accounts for, so I waited a couple days. I saw on Wednesday at 10am that the main vendor had 197 of the monitors in stock at $134 each. I went to place the order at 11am after I was out of the meeting and there were only 4 left in stock and they were at $158. I managed to find 8 monitors for my customer today, but they were not the models that matched the ones currently in her office and she had to choose between keeping the same price but getting monitors that need a converter and only having a one-year warranty OR getting the same brand (though a slightly different model) with the same inputs and the same warranty but paying $50 more per monitor.
It has been a pain in the ass to buy graphics equipment for years, and there have been ups and downs with HDDs and SSDs and RAM, but this is the biggest overall "everything computer related" shortage that I've seen and that includes the run on laptops last year and various other floods and disasters that have taken out big chunks of the supply chain.
SO my advice is to try to keep your current devices running as best you can, do some preventative maintenance and make some backups and make sure they aren't getting heat stressed.
If you can afford a computer right now and you think you'll need one and you've found one for a good price, go get it.
Black Friday/holiday sale computers are usually pretty crap but if you think you may need to get a computer at a discount, that's the time to look for one and now's the time to start saving for it. Just make sure you're getting a relatively new processor because a lot of people are unloading stuff with older processors at low prices because they won't be compatible with Windows 11.
RAM, HDDs, and SSDs are actually pretty stable at the moment so if you think you can get your computer to limp along for a while longer with an upgrade instead of a replacement, try that.
Remember: if you kill your laptop screen you can always plug it in to an external monitor, and if you kill the keyboard or trackpad you can plug in USB devices instead of using the built-in components. If your battery is dead but the computer still works when it's plugged in, you can often replace the battery cheaply. If your battery is swollen, remove the battery and discard it, but remember that you will likely still be able to use your computer when it is plugged in.
Try to take care of your tech and treat it gently for a while if you can; don't yank out cables, don't drop shit, don't keep drinks around your devices and if you have pets or if you smoke, consider opening up your device and cleaning up accumulated ash/dust/dander/hair etc.
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