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How Much Are You Paying For Electronics Labels?
An anonymous reader writes "Interesting article on CNET about different consumer electronics brands selling identical OEM products, often at wildly different price points. The author also examines the phenomenon of manufacturers releasing "consumer" and "industrial" versions of the same product -- with the cheaper version aimed at businesses. Probably old news for the slashdot crowd, but it's worth reading to see how much Middle America is overpaying. Caveat emptor, indeed." And there are also product lines where the expensive version is aimed at business buyers, because a higher price implies greater credibility.
Old news indeed. I knew this to be the case in TVs when I worked for my father at his TV store in the 60s. It was especially prevalent in home stereo equipment in the 70s and 80s.
The major manufacturers create their own "competition" to flood the market with at the most popular price ranges, often selling under 4 or 5 labels simultaneously, and not all of them at the same price level, despite identical guts. Three major Japanese manufacturers accounted for 14 brands at a "super-store" I visited on a research jaunt, back when I sold the stuff.
Want an eye opener? Go find out who obtained the patents on VHS and Beta VCR systems. Not the current patent/license owners; the creator sold the license for one of them to a competitor, so that no matter which format "won" they'd still be making money.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Wrong.
Sager resells Clevos, just like Alienware. Although, the latest Area-51m is a Uniwill I believe.
If you want to get even cheaper on managed switches, SMC gear is the exact same thing that Dell is selling at half the price.
You see Accton makes a ton of unmanaged and managed gear. They sell bigtime to the OEM market, and they also make most of Dell's stuff.
Who owns SMC? Accton.
Crack the cases and look at them side-by-side and it all becomes clear. Buy Dell and you pay twice as much for the same exact switch. Buy two for the same price as the Dell and you have support that even Dell can't beat - an always available spare!
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
ConsumerReports.org
I used to have a subscription to the magazine. It was quite useful. Now, unless something is really a lot of money, I don't research the purchase anymore. I just buy the cheapest thing that will do the job. That usually works fine.
In Canada, we have a publication called LemonAid. It gives really good information about buying new and used cars. It is published by the Automobile Protective Association. I won't buy a car without checking it.
The bottom line is that we are not completely helpless in the face of manufacturers' bs.
This is no different than the automobile industry
Ford = Mercury = Lincoln
Chevy = GM
Chrysler = Dodge
Honda = Acura
Toyota = Lexus = Scion
Volkswagen = Audi = Porsche
The automobile family tree runs back over itself in so many different ways. Ford owns part of Mazda, and they both produce an identical SUV... with different name badging.
I saw a great show on the History Channel about the history of the gasoline. Long story short, there are two types of gasoline pipes used to transport, dedicated and community. Dedicated transport pipes transport only one brand gasoline, and I believe Texaco and someone else has their own dedicated lines.
The rest use a pipe network that takes 14 days to send gasoline from one end to another. The system is setup that you can put in X gallons at one end and extract X gallons the same day from the other end, in effect it shares gas.
The caveat I alluded to is when gas companies extract the gasoline from the pipeline, they do add in additives to improve performance, help maintain seals, et al. However, the additives are for the most part the same too.
They don't have 3 gas pipes for each grade, 87, 89 (91 if you have it), or 93. They have one pipe, and they have to send all different octanes through. The gas does mix and when the transition gas (there's a proper name for it) is extracted (it doesn't go in the tanker truck), it's sold to other companies that don't care about octane ratings, that just want gas for industrial purposes.
This practice is called third degree price discrimination. Basically it indicates that an economist working for the company has separated the market into two or more segments. Through studies, they have determined that the price elasticity of demand is different in each of these segments. (this means that a 1 percent change in price in each of these markets will produce different changes in demand for the product). Because of this, it is possible to maximize profits by selling the product in the two different markets for different prices. (since firms sell at the price where marginal revenue is equal to the marginal cost of producing one more unit of the good, it is to their benefit to separate this marginal revenue for the two different markets, as the market that will accept the higher price will increase profits significantly.) An example economists like to give is selling goods at an airport. People are willing to pay more for the equivalent good at an airport for the convenience of having that good now, while they wait for their plane.
Yup, guess the 20gb ipod for $299 is a huge scam over the $270 dell DJ.
Not to mention the overpriced iPod mini -- $250 for a unit that contains drives that retail for $449 according to the lowest price Hitachi will point you to (J&R Music world).
Yes, I'm aware the Creative MuVo is cheaper, but honestly not that much. And clearly not the same product with the same great support and return policies, and...
Usually industrial parts are bin-sorted, because suppliers get it through the nose if their parts fail during a QA run (I've watched a Fortune 50 company refuse to do business with a chip house until they fixed some issues with one of their processes - Wal-Mart tactics get used all over). As a result, if the manufacturer can't guarantee the spec by design, they'll bin-sort.
On the other hand, at least for chips its unusual for there to be any difference between the parts other than the guaranteed temperature ranges (consumer is usually 0-70c, industrial is usually -40 to 125c, and military is usually -50 to 150c). Industrial parts come at a minor premium over consumer, while milspec parts come at a major premium over industrial.
So, to make it short - 90% of the time, ICs are bin-sorted and sold as binned. Every once in a while, you'll come across a consumer part that runs like an industrial, but its rare.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The desktop precision systems are the same as well. Just a Optiplex or Dimension with a good video card.
The difference between Precision Workstation (and similar products from Compaq and IBM) and other systems, are that they are qualified platforms for specialized applications. So if you want to run a specific MCAD/CAE suite, nonlinear editing tool or scientific visualization system, the fact that your application vendor has already qualified the machine is a major benefit, since the platform has already been integrated and tested and incompatibilties have been ruled out. Especially with vertical market applications.
You may be able to buy Dimension cheaper (though I found the Precisions in fact were cheaper because you could unbundle the home/small office items like speakers and "internet" keyboards) but you'll pay for it in the time you spend sourcing the video card, installing the driverset, and explaining to the support engineer from your app vendor what system you have and why you're not running a qualified platform.
Compare:
SMC TigerSwitch 8624T
Dell PowerConnect 5224
NetGear GSM7324
DLink DGS-3324SR
Well, that's all of them, except for Linksys, which is just rebranded Cisco equipment.
And of course, they all use COMPLETELY DIFFERENT firmware. Lovely.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'll comment on this since I've reverse-engineered both products.
They accomplish EXACTLY the same thing but the two products run completely different hardware AND software. Linksys does this so that they can pit one vendor against another until neither makes any money.
The wireless gaming adaptor uses a MIPS clone from SiliconData with integrated PCI and ethernet interfaces and a Mini-PCI 802.11g card.
The WET54G uses a Ubicom processor (same as what's in the WET-11 except 160MHz instead of 120MHz. It has a Davicom 10/100 MAC and a Cardbus 802.11g card.
Both probably cost exactly the same to produce, but having two designs gives leverage on the supply side and the ability to justify two vastly different price points on the shelf.
There is a similar situation with the "Disk Doctor", "DVD Doctor", "Game Doctor", etc. These products, once you read the manual, readily admit that they are all identical CD cleaning kits. I guess that people will pay more money for a product that they feel is specialized to their exact needs, than for one that is general-purpose and might work just as well.
It was commonly said about DEC equipment was that it was good stuff, high reliability and well built, but expensive. One oft-repeated comment was "We'd love to be an all-DEC shop but we can't afford it."
Apparently someone who owned both the expensive DEC drives and the less expensive - but still extremely reliable - CDC drives decided to take a look and see why the DEC drives were so much more expensive. They had to do some preventative maintenance on one anyway so they decided to look at both of them. So they disassembled both and checked them out.
Apparently what it was, was that DEC put together a high quality drive, added some electronics to it, and built their own from that. And what did DEC use for the high quality drive that they sold for $27,000? The very same $7,000 drive from Control Data!
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
A friend worked at LambWeston (a potato processor) who sold fries to most fast food stores. McDonald's picked the most rotten spuds, while Arby's and BurgerKing had the best spuds. The translucent crispy part of a McDonalds fry is rotten potato. The current secret to McDonald's fries is a bit of sugar mixed with the salt. If you don't believe me add some to the next batch of fries you get, they will taste just like McDonald's with a bit of sugar.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Slight correction: The Poweredge 400SC can cost as low as $250 with the Celeron processor and $300 with the Pentium 4 (2.4Ghz) with Hyper Threading (HT) after rebates which are common on these units (just watch techbargains.com). Well worth the upgrade to the Pentium with HT because of the dual-port RAM (800 Mhz) as well as HT, and of course, the faster Pentium processor over the Celeron. I have one with the Pentium chip and two PC3200 RAM chips and this system just screams. Plus it is built like a tank, particularly the power supply. The motherboard is the I875 from Intel and it has gigabit ethernet and SATA. One of my drives, a 250 gig Hitachi is on the SATA and the other is on the regular EIDE. I can copy a DVD movie (4 GB) is about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Whisper quiet unless you are really pushing the processor hard, then you might hear a little bit of fan noise. Comes standard with a 7200 RPM 40 Gig drive. Only complaint is the cover they put on the front blocks the USB 2.0 ports that are ALREADY INSTALLED ON THE FRONT!!! - wierd. Quick Dremel job fixes the problem, but it isn't as pretty as a correctly designed case. They do have 6 USB 2.0 ports on the back, so you could just run a hub or a few extension cables to the rear of the case to get easy front access. Nice, Nice, Nice. I highly recommend these machines. Oh, one more thing, these machines don't come with an operating system (no MS tax, yeah). I've installed win2000, Mandrake 9.2, and win2000 server(only $50 through non-profit routes), all with no problems. If someone can show me a better machine than these for the money, I would love to hear about it (after I call BS first).
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
Although the batteries may come from the same manufacturer, and probably all from the same batches, there is a difference. At the end of the manufacturing step, the batteries are carefully tested using some precision electronics to measure things like internal resistance and impulse current. The subtle differences at that stage reveal whether a battery will die earlier or last longer. That is what determines which reseller label gets applied. The higher margin, well known brands will take bin 1 or bin 2 cells, lower margin store brands like to buy bin 5 or bin 6, which have a slightly lesser capacity. At the low end are the cells from bins 8 or 9, which will have a shorter shelf life, and die after a small amount of use. Those low quality cells tend to end up included with toys and other cheap consumer goods sporting a generic label.
The differences between the best and medium quality is not much, but the reject cells can be pretty bad.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on