Online History Of Computer Component Prices?

jtdubs asks: "I was pricing out computer components today and stumbled across an idea for a Web site. It would be nice to be able to query a database by product type (CPU, RAM) or brand (INTEL, AMD, Corsair) and be able to get graphs of each of their products and a graph of their respective prices over time. It could be helpful for determining when price drops will occur or for analyzing how new product releases affect pricing and would just be generally neat. Does anything like this exist already?"

Comments

Ratios might be better

[cybermage]

I think if you simply looked to graph the price over time for a given model by a given manufacturer, I think you'll find a downward pattern, but by the time you want it, it'll no longer exist or be a generation behind what's current.

What would be better would be more of a Consumer Guide that compared like things and tracked them, for example: Live and Historical information across manufacturer and model lines for $/MB of disk drive. Seeing what a historical low is for storage, and the current price range, might be a good thing.

Of course, for disk space, the historical chart will still trend downward, but not so for memory (atleast not lately.)

If this site also gave links to buy cheaply on the net, even better.

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Slight problem

[bconway]

The idea is great, but the problem is that technology advances at too great of a speed. Most charts would start at a high point and then slowly level off at a lower price, before being replaced by newer hardware of a different type/speed. Think about it, how many components in your current system are the same type (i.e. memory goes from EDO -> PC100, etc) that were in your system 3 years ago? The same technologies just aren't in use for long enough for this to be too exciting of a pattern to chart. Again, I think it's a great idea, but you would probably see similar graphs for most items over the course of about 6 months, before they would drop off in favor of newer technologies (i.e. newer graphics chipsets, in the case of video cards).

Graphs on Streetprices.com

[SEWilco]

Someone else mentioned Streetprices.Com, but did not mention that there are graphs there. For example, run down through the Notebook pages and you'll find pages like this one with a chart of prices.

Great Idea!!! Buuuuutttt....

[psicic]

...at the moment I haven't been able to find a definitive or comprehensive list on the 'net.
You can find charts for specific products by doing a 'Webferret' search - but then you're only talking about street prices, which are beaten daily on the internet, and are really only 'guide prices' for most products on the high street.
If you're buying, your best bet is to cross reference a list of available components with sites like:
Streetprices.com - perhaps one of the best sites
cnet - does some price comparisons

If you're still doing research then why not go to some of the component-specific sites on the web, such as http://www.motherboards.org/ and the like. They often have articles that deal with price fluctuations. Your fav computer mag.'s web site no doubt also has a littany of articles on the subject with decent research in them.
But methinks the resource you're after would be valuable to marketing students more than anyone else - if that's your thrust then I suggest you go to the manufacturer's web pages ( should you be trying to get geeks to do your marketing project for you? :). Seriously, I think the reason such a site isn't about at the moment is that such information can be used to do exactly what you want to do - the large firms probably wouldn't want geeks and non-geeks to suss out how the whole 'product life-cycle' and 'price-cycle' works and disrupt the whole thing. For the moment your just going to have to use that power that lies somewhere between 'the force' and 'the knack' and kinda guesstimate when prices are about to fall.
8)

The price cycle

[smoon]

This would be very interesting vis a vis product era. For example, a 120MB SCSI 5.25" tape drive might have cost $3000 new in 1992, been a blowout clear-the-shelves price of $100 in 1995, and then be $6000 in the need-to-access-old-tapes-at-any-cost market in 1998. (prices and capacities are totally fictional to illustrate the point). Whether the brand is wang, hp, connor, exabyte, etc. is immaterial as long as it's the same technology (QIC/4mm/8mm/etc.)

I think this idea is sound, but there are so many products and so much turnover I think you'd want to aggregate somehow -- keeping with the tape drive example, look at a graph of 80MB, 120MB, 640MB, 1.2GB, etc. drives, and see the average/median/whatever price over time for a given technology, possibly with some correlation to quantities manufactured/sold.

Sounds like a great economics project for school... I think there's definitely a pattern in all of this, but how to winnow it out? Anyone work for a big distributor with access to old price databases?

Who cares?

[Chacham]

The switch in price is useless. There is so much that needs to be thought about.

For example:

• In December components go up in price.
• After December components go down in price.
• There are special products such as hard drives of odd sizes, look at pricewatch.com for many anomalies.
• Catastrophies such as fires or floods wipe out storehouses in other parts of the world that bring prices up.
• Economic difficulties haves cheap parts from countries flood the market beinging prices down.
• Standards can make or brerak a product.

Price can't tell you how good something is, or even garantee its future, unless you look in the long run over many similar products. Such as memory, but keep watching as the standard moves, EDO got cheaper until SDRAM took over, then PC100, etc... Overall Memory was over $40 a meg just a few years ago, and is now closer to a half-dollar.

There are certain things that can be pointed out, overall after December prices fall, but do you really need a graph to show that?

If you're looking for day to day prices, so many stores vary, it's hard to show a graph of that. You just have to follow it yourself.

I searched the blue sheets...

[human bean]

and found no trace of such pricing data. Which also means that there is no formal market and hence, maybe nobody to track prices.

On the other hand, this might represent an opportunity. I wonder if electronics manufacturers have considered selling futures on their products, and if there would be willing buyers? Might be a way to provide up-front financing to smooth cash flow for the parts maker, and provide a guaranteed supply to parts users.

The electronics industry may be too vertical for this, however, with a lot of the consumer equipment companies owning parts manufacturers.

Re:I searched the blue sheets...

[human bean]

Exactly so. I was thinking of the manufacturing process for most components, which happens in lots, and about technology "hold" times (the time it takes for a design to be older/less salable).

What I don't know is the extent to which JIT or similar business methods have been implemented in larger electronics manufacturing. Could be that the parts producer runs smaller lots and scaled to order.