According to a post on Mumsnet’s Am I Being Unreasonable (AIBU) forum, user Glassback83 was planning to buy his 16-year-old son a PC for his birthday.
But the user’s father (who has been building computers “for years”) said he could build one for “cheaper” than it would be to buy one from a store. So they agreed to have him do it and have the PC be a gift from the user and the child’s grandparents.
While global PC sales rose during the height of the pandemic, with more people working from home, the latest Mumsnet post follows a record drop in PC shipments worldwide, which saw its sharpest decline in nine years in the second quarter of 2022, according to a July 2022 report by the research firm Gartner.
The decline was attributed to ongoing “geopolitical instability” following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supply chain disruptions, inflation and “a steep downturn in demand for Chromebooks,” said Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner’s research director.
Kitagawa explained: “To maintain profits as inflation increases costs, the PC industry is having to raise average selling prices (ASPs) despite weakening demand. The reduction in the mix of PCs from Chromebooks, which tend to have low price points, and shift to premium products also helped increase the average ASP.
“However, an increase in inventory, especially in the consumer channel, could cause an ASP decline as vendors will try to lower inventory,” the director added.
The user in the latest Mumsnet post said he bought £400 ($485) worth of hard drives and a £250 ($303) monitor. His father allegedly said “he had bits lying around he could use but said to give him [the user] a couple of hundred pounds for other bits.”
However, the original poster said his dad later asked for £500 ($606) instead, saying he “had to buy a couple of things,” one of which the user said costs less than £10 ($12).
He said: “He’s added everything up (minus what I’ve bought) as [if] it were all brand new” and “divided the cost between us, even though some of the parts were laying around in the back of a cupboard.”
According to a list of the additional items the user was sent by his father, the total cost to be split between them was £1,010.05 ($1,224).
“Too late to change our minds now as it’s already built. AIBU to be really pi**ed off? Feel like I’ve been conned by my own parents,” the original poster said, adding “Think my [mom] might be the driving factor behind this.”
In a later post, the user said he told his dad that “it’s a lot more than we expected based on our initial conversation” and his father allegedly did “a complete U-turn and now wants nothing” for the computer.
Several Mumsnet users sided with the original poster, saying he has the “right to get angry” and that it would have been cheaper for him to buy a computer from elsewhere.
One user said: “I think you’ve got the right to get angry here…,” while another user said: “You have been conned by your parents tbh [to be honest]. You can get a good quality monitor/hard drives for far cheaper than that…”
A third said: “Could have bought one cheaper op [original poster],” and SarahSissions agreed, stating: “You could’ve bought a really nice computer for that…sounds like you’ve paid for the lot!!!”
While another asked: “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just buy a computer with insurance and packages like Microsoft office on it rather than home make one?”
Some users agreed it was “strange” that the user’s father later changed his stance and that perhaps the user’s mother may have been involved in the incident.
One said: “How strange, especially with the latest update that he’s no longer asking for money! There’s something strange happening behind the scenes. I’d want to know if they’re having money trouble, unless one of them (your [mom]?) has form for trying to take advantage where money is involved…”
While another said: “I wonder if you were right that your [mom] put him up to it. (It’s odd that he wanted to split the cost of the second hand stuff he provided but conveniently didn’t add in/split the cost of the brand new stuff you bought).”
