The real disturbing thing about the new computer was the apparent commercialism that was built into the machine, MS assuming that I wanted to use their stupid browser, shop at Amazon and eBay and of course, buy anti-virus software (which I have never used in my entire life). The computer people have also lost their target audience. Its not the kid thru 35 year olds that are buying laptops, its us old farts. I don't need all the crap apps that will run on a cell phone (that is why I bought a laptop), or any of the other crap that came with it.
The end.
'ner
As noted before, this is definitely not new. What are now Amazon and Ebay, used to be AOL and Yahoo back in the day.
MS really doesn't give a hoot about what you use. They sell bulk license to the manufacturer, and they walk away whether eMachines or Sony or Lenovo sells the hardware to you or not. The manufacturers then as DoubleJ notes, take money from all the other parties to keep costs down to you. There is very little money in building computers, even when I was figuring out the difference in 2002, I could build a Dell for about $200 less than they could. For folks not technically inclined, that $200 was the cost of avoiding a headache while I was happy to build a little higher spec machine or just pocket the difference. I'm the ratio is not near as big now, since most any $400 machine has enough guts to run a browser and basic software.
Old people are not the target audience. Old people for lack of a better term, are a dying audience. Old people at this current time aren't particularly tech saavy and manufacturers know it. Old people buy on price above all else, because a computer is a black and/or magic box to them (and if its not, they tend to listen to ill informed salesman when making the decision anyway which is just as good for the manufacturer and very few old people have real performance needs out of the hardware), so while I'm not going indulge in their adware boxes at a retailer, the manufacturers know I have four grandparents who will.
Old people do have money, and old people probably buy more pre-built computers than young people. But in many instances, old people might buy a computer for themself, alot of times they are buying computers for kids or grandkids who might be going to school or whatever.
If you wanted to build a target "old people" PC, you would probably take some trivial amount of hardware and put a stripped down Linux on it, lock it down, and treat it more or less like a toaster that can browse the internet and upload photos. Hence the popularity of tablets, and especially iPads.
