In todays WSJ, it was announced that Intel had dropped the prices of its Pentiums by 30%-35%. I assume AMD will follow suit (if they haven’t already) within 48 hours. How long before retail prices reflect these changes? Knowing that there are people like me waiting, will retailers (CompUSA?) drop their prices to move the merchandise?
Well, it is kind of misleading. Sure Intel dropped the price on CPU chips, but on older chips, to get rid of excess supply. These slower computers will be sold cheaper the older they get, but will be replaced by faster newer models. The price of a top-of-the-line brand-spanking-new PC has remained about $2K for the last 10 years, and will continue to do so in the near future. You might get one on a Christmas sale coming up for a little bit cheaper (maybe 5%) but no huge price crash.
In my experience, the price of a PC will drop about a week after you finally get sick of waiting and go ahead and buy the damn thing :mad:
The price only drops if the supply of components stays stable. Otherwise the price of a PC can rise.
Generally, I would say that in 6 months the computer you got today would be half the price you paid for it.
You can get an emachine for freee after rebates. How much lower can it be?
There is a general price level below which there is no incentive for the manufacturer to produce the item in question. Instead of the price dropping, what you see instead is the increase in features, memory capacity and power effeciency.
The average disk drive costs about $10.00 to put in place. Imagine how cheap your average PC is to make. Competition is so savage that if prices could be lowered substantially, they already would have been.
SOC (System On Chip) type architecture is one of the few paradigm shifts that holds any promise for decreased price. However, the immense cost of developing this new technology will be passed on to the consumer for some time to come. Therefore, even this developement is unlikely to have any impact on pricing in the near term.
$400.00 without the internet rebate included. That $21.95 per month for three years costs $790. With these rebates, there’s no reason for prices to drop below $400, even thoug perhaps they could.
That’s $790 to be tied to MSN for three years. I’d rather sacrifice my first born child (if I had one).
“That’s $790 to be tied to MSN for three years”, yeah we once talked about internet rebates here. Strange, but you could get MSN from Costco for $12.00 a month, yet, right from MSN its $21.95 a month. But then Costco now has free internet access. sigh.
I saw a new emachine at the store. I clicked on Outlook waited & waited, turned around, found a Compaq, same speed, clicked on Outlook, waited about 20 seconds, it loaded, then went back to the emachine computer & it was still trying to load Outlook. emachines are pretty slow for some reason.