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When to Buy Technology Goods?
inblosam asks: "I am about to make 'the switch', but the thought came to me that there may be a strategic time of year to purchase technology goods. Of course once you buy something it is nearly outdated already, but there must be some marketing cycle for lowering prices and releasing new toys. Anyone seen any patterns that may help? I do have one hypothesis: Companies push their products that have been on the market for 10-11 months during the holiday season (December), then afterwards drop the prices some and bump up the product with a new feature or size, etc. I believe this was the case for the iPod ($500 down to $300 ?), and even the Handspring Visor Edge was $300 when I bought it (November?) and then $169 three months later."
During the Christmas season, prices go up because retailers know people will pay.
:).
Go to Mac fan sites and find out when all the Mac shows are (obviously that's when the new stuff comes out).
Sometimes new stuff comes out before Christmas for the first reason I listed. Photokina (the big camera show) starts next week I think. The new models announced will probably arrive on store shelves at the end of October (can't wait for a Canon G3
I deal in the retail computer/technology world, mainly compaq, epson, HP, and Envision(AOC) monitors.
:)
Never fails, pretty much every 3 months compaq replaces their desktop line, and 3-4 months their laptop line(presarios and evos alike I believe... I work with both). Stocking them gets to be a bitch in a small market like ours... we order frequent small orders so not to get stuck with old models. So, if we hit it wrong, we're without computers for a week, because the old stock runs out, but the new stuff's still backordered.
Never fails, EVERY back-to-school season we run waaay short, especially on laptops(so figure your cycle starting end of august).
Epson and HP's printers keep a little more lifespan, usually 4-6 months, whenever the decide we need more faux-resolution increase, or a new type of ink/cartridge.
Monitors... a year or better product cycle, at least for CRTs anyway... havent changed much beside the (case) color in a while either.
I usually buy RIGHT at the end of product life.. get nice and cheap then.. but i hate it because the next product I see a week later is always sooo much cooler
Buy an electronics product when you need it, or when it would make a substantial improvement in your quality of life.
Yes, prices usually drop somewhat after the winter holidays, but prices on most of today's consumer electronics will continue to go lower and lower as eqipment bought a few months ago becomes obselete because of the latest "advance." The solution: wait until you need something and buy it then. If you become obsessed with getting the best price on something and timing the market, you'll either never buy or drive yourself crazy.
That seems about right, then it is worthless after 6 mos.
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This is really somewhat understating the point. Several generations of product improvements are in the works typically before the latest gadget hits the market. This is reason for the pattern of precipitous prices drops a few months after a new toy is introduced (in addition to making money off of all the suckers that just have to have something as soon as it gets into the stores).
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Parent's message is OK for students and personal use. Industry is another issue.... when figuring out the next step w.r.t. purchasing technology, the question is the bottom line and only the bottom line. Say you have an engineer pulling down $80k/year -- probably means $90k w/ fringes. Buying the fastest reliable box on the block (say $6k well loaded) only has to save 1 hour in 15 to pay for itself: so if said engineer is sitting waiting on the stupid machine to crunch for a total of 30 minutes a day (or equivalently 4 minutes per hour), early adoption pays for itself.
The question just cannot be answered. There is no single 'BEST' time to buy technology, no matter how quickly price drops off with time.
Instead, when you 'should' buy a technology depends on the tradeoff between how badly you 'need' that technology and how badly you need to save money. For some people, waiting 1 week or even 1 day for the end of the next MacExpo might be too long to wait to buy the latest/greatest Mac.
Do you HAVE to have the fastest computer out there because you're doing rendering or financial modelling or something really CPU intensive ? If your time is worth enough $, then maybe the time to buy the latest/fastest/greatest AMD/Intel chip or whatever is now. If, on the other hand, you're a hobbyist, then maybe you can make do with a slower CPU or the penultimate video card instead of the ultimate until prices drop.
I disagree--I'm reluctantly beginning to agree with the crowd that says "MHz don't matter for most of us." I used to think they were idiots--more power was always better. I bought a Dell Precision 420 dual-capable PIII-733 in September 2000 with Win2K and 256MB of RDRAM. I've since added the second processor, 512MB more RDRAM, and assorted minor toys. I'm still using a beautiful 19" Mitsubishi 900u monitor I bought in 1999. In twenty years, I've never before had a two-year old machine with so much life in it. I barely even drool over a dual-2.8GHz Xeon, even though it would almost triple the clock speed. Compare that to past two year upgrades:
1995: Pentium 120
1997: Pentium II 300
2000: Pentium III 733
I'm still throwing huge computing projects at this machine (complex maximum-likelihood statistical models with 100,000+ records), and nothing can choke up the combination of dual processors and plenty of RAM. This in spite of the fact that I had grave doubts about the Intel 840 platform and RDRAM given the public criticism at the time.
The bottom line: buy the best machine you can now, and you may be happy to keep it a very long time.
We can reduce ideas to bits and people to genes, but "can" does not imply "should".
Aren't "cheapest" and "fastest" conflicting criteria? The cheapest way is to use your current hardware and let it crank away; this has a marginal cost of zero. The fastest strategy probably involves waiting until you can afford to buy hardware that will solve the problem in a time that's on the same order of magnitude as the doubling time in Moore's law.
My rule of thumb has always been, wait until you just can't bear the old computer any longer.
This totally depends on what you want. You might find that a new machine with new software is slower -- that's often been my experience with desktop software. Personally, I downgraded recently from a fancy mac to a slower, less powerful $250 linux box, but I'm happier now than before, because I can run so much open-source software. If you're mainly interested in playing games, then what you're saying makes sense. But in general, it's a pernicious Microsoft myth that software rusts and needs to be replaced often. If you don't upgrade to the latest bloatware, you don't need faster hardware.
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Speaking as a former Distribution Rep, the lowest prices that are offered to Retail and VAR/LAR customers tend to come at/near the end of the summer. Right now is the best time to purchase.
It's actually the best time to purchase, better than post-Xmas.
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Check the product pricing curve. For example, look at CPU's. We all woo at the higher-ghz offerings from AMD and Intel. However, those CPUs tend to have the worst price/performance ration. For example (looking at http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=169 7&p=2), the Athlon XP 2200+ is $147. The XP 2100+ (only 66 mhz slower) is $117. The XP 2000+ (133 mhz slower then the 2200+) is only $92. Comparing the 2000+ (1.67Ghz) to the 2200+ (1.8Ghz), you are paying 60% more money for an 8% increase in speed. Wouldn't that extra $55 be a lot better if spent on memory or a faster HDD?
A lot of hardware tends to be priced this way. You pay a premium for 'cutting edge'. You are paying more to be the first guinea pig to test their product. In a working environment, do you really want to do this?
Speaking of which, know what you are buying. Don't buy junk, it will come back to bite you. Buy from quality manufacturers who have a history of supporting their products. For windows machines, go with companies that release stable drivers. Also, try to figure out where you need the speed. Do you need fast HDD access? Maybe a Gigabit network. Or is it raw computing power? Read the reviews of the hardware, and check usenet to see if anyone has had any problems.
In short, do your homework, buy quality, and avoid the high-priced bleeding edge hardware.
Just my $.02
This is even more true if you're paying mondo dollars for per-instance licenses on some compute heavy software.
For instance, here at work, our design team uses LSF to farm off simulation jobs to all our desktop machines. To get a certain throughput (so the engineers aren't idle), they need a certain number of licenses running all at once. Licenses for some of these packages go for something like $60,000/CPU. So, if you save even 20% on the compute time, you can cut your license costs dramatically and more than make back your investment on the hardware.
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