Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage

Summary

A major Japanese PC and electronics store is pleading with customers to sell their old PC gear. “As a favor, if you buy a new one, please sell your gaming PC to our company,” begged the X-account of Sofmap Gaming in Akihabara, the Electric Town district of Tokyo (machine translation, h/t PC-Watch). The store shared a photo of some almost barren shelves, presumably taken at its triple-floor retail establishment.“Gaming PCs, even used ones, are really out of stock right now,” wrote Sofmap, as an explanation for its call for old rigs. In the above Tweet, it asks customers to come in and sell their old PCs, highlighting that “We buy them back at pretty high prices...”Moreover, the company underlined that it wasn’t going to be fussy. “Whether it's a gaming desktop or a laptop, or even a regular non-gaming one, we pretty much buy any PC...”These are clearly the words of a PC retailer facing consumer demand that it just can’t meet. We reported on Akihabara store trying to limit new RAM, SSD, and HDD sales back in November.Old becomes goldThe memory supply crunch impacted the PC industry faster and more deeply than many would have predicted. The insatiable demand for memory from AI data center makers, with their deep circular-funded pockets, caused the first pricing jolts in the PC memory market. That’s reasonable, as consumers and industry both need to be fed product from the same big-three memory makers.Consumers saw the first impacts on modern DDR5 pricing. Some DDR5 kits, if you can find them in stock, like this Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-5200 16GB (2x8GB) on Amazon is now $235. That price is more than 3.5X what it cost last October ($66).However, there remains some hope that DDR4 pricing and availability, thanks to old stocks and upgraders already having DIMMs, could provide a safe haven for continued PC building. This perception even seems to permeate PC component makers, with more DDR4-supporting motherboards being manufactured, plus hints about new processors for DD...