What if PC demand falls off a cliff once the refresh cycle ends?
A post-refresh PC-shipment cliff is a client-end demand shock — short Dell/HP/AMD-client and PC-exposed memory, not the AI-capex complex. The cascade wrongly sells NVDA/Broadcom/HBM, which ride datacenter, not consumer PCs; Micron's Dec-2024 weak FQ2 guide (the cited analogue) was the PC/consumer-NAND leg selling off while AI-HBM held. Forward: AI-PC upgrade cycle could backstop the trough sooner than the 2001 post-Y2K air-pocket.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Enterprise PC refresh ends abruptly, sending shipments into a steep decline and gutting Dell, HP, and AMD client revenue. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Growth surprise ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.