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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 Of course once you buy something it is nearly outdated already, but there must be some marketing cycle for lowering prices and releasing new toys.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."
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.
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".