How important are the processors at this point?

Michael Schwab: When you think about the processor world one of the things that has been challenging is that there has been a dearth of US manufacturing of processors. That has come to the forefront in Washington DC with a focus on how do we reverse the trend where we have put ourselves in terms of chip manufacturing. There is no short term fix there.

The manufacturers we work with are all trying to maximize output and deliver their products which become components into the various solutions we sell whether it is components, Egaming, or finished products like desktops, notebooks or servers.

The reality is with the short supply we are seeing manufacturers produce best in class products. Before you might have had a mix of mid and higher end and a pretty good quantity of lower end chips. I think the lower end chips are really on the backburner and the manufacturers are really focused on producing their highest end technology which in a way I think is a good thing.

From an end user perspective they are getting a best in class experience whereas perhaps in the past people would shop on price and it was sort of a race to the bottom to see who could hit some magic price point on computing technology. I never quite understood that because of the robust nature of what goes into these devices. This is forcing everyone’s hand to sell their best product, the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life and most robust graphics. That’s what we’re seeing in the marketplace. It’s a great customer experience.

Dan Schwab: That has been part and parcel to our success because in a year of limited supply our vendors were offering more premium products, more higher end products. It is not higher priced product. It is higher value products. We spent a lot of time educating partners and the reseller community about the pivot and shift to the higher value products. With the opening price point notebooks not ready for a quarter or two, we focused on the step up models, why they make sense, the feature sets that add value and why they are meaningful to businesses. I think D&H better than anyone did a really good job of selling up the stack and focusing our organization and partners on where product was available so that we could fulfill that end user need. It may not have been the initial expectation of what the reseller and end user were thinking was the right solution. In most cases they ended up with a more robust and longer-term solution.