It wasn't too long ago you could pick up a sub-$500 gaming PC or gaming laptop in the yearly sales. Sure, it'd almost certainly be reliant on an iGPU or older tech, and it wouldn't be the most powerful machine in the world.
But thanks to the ongoing memory crisis (and various other supply chain factors), budget PC prices have been creeping up—and now top analyst firm Gartner is predicting that even sub-$500, entry-level, non-gaming PCs will have disappeared by 2028.
