Slashdot Mirror
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.
Wrong.
Sager resells Clevos, just like Alienware. Although, the latest Area-51m is a Uniwill I believe.
Yes, I do. This horrific color scheme has caused me to go blind -- I hadn't realized beige could be made so painful.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A friend of mine worked in a factory that made liquid soap. She ran a bottling machine. She said there would be batches of hundreds of bottles at a time. Each batch would have a different label, and would sell at a different price in the store. But they were filling them with the same slop from the same tank.
Unknown host pong.
about the same as those Nike trainers,starbucks coffee,Gap Shirt,Armani Trousers
its called branding, the selling of dreams
Ever notice that competing businesses often locate next to each other? This is not so much to take business away from the other, but it's been found that the appearance of competition drives sales, so they both get more business than if they located seperately. The ultimate example of this is the shopping mall.
Ever notice "clumps" of shoe stores at the mall? They're often owned by the same company to imply competition between them when there isn't any really.
The implication of competition drives sales so they set up the implication artificially.
Proctor & Gamble are masters of working this, many cleaning products advertised as being better than the other are the same except for their packaging and a difference in the food coloring added, and the same as a bargain brand for a fraction the cost.
And the same as the "house" brand at a fraction of that cost.
KFG
For example, the Panasonic 42" plasma had a "consumer" and an "industrial" version. However, the article pointed out that the industrial version was $350 lower than the consumer version while glossing over the fact that the industrial version lacked an HDTV tuner, and built-in speakers. Clearly, the addition of those items justifies some increase, and 2-400 is reasonable given the cost of HDTV tuners as separate components.
In addition, he neglected to mention the difference in warranty duration (and the difference in customer service you might expect between a "name" brand such as RCA and a "generic" such as Coby).
No, really! I'm one of the *good* lawyers!
In the 80's I worked in a commercial photo finishing lab -- the place your film gets processed when you drop it off at a grocery store.
They charged more to develop ISO 400 film than ISO 100 film. The explanation was that the customers thought that since ISO 400 film was more expensive, it would be harder or more costly to process it.
But the fact was that all C-41 films went through exactlythe same process. In fact, it costs less to process ISO 400, because more silver is recovered for recycling during the process.
So the conclusion is, they charge what people are willing to pay.
I dunno, it's kind of an achievement, "Radioactive Beige". Until now, no color scheme had ever acheived simultaneous DayGlo and Drab. By rights, it just shouldn't be possible. Yet there it is, making my eyes scream and my ears bleed. BEIGE BEIGE BEIGE BEIGE BEIGE.
THE BEIGE OF A DAMNED ELDER GOD YEARNING TO ENFOLD YOU IN THE HORRIBLE CLUTCHES OF ITS CLOYINGLY INSIPID YET AGGRESSIVELY MALEVOLENT TINT.
Not the merely mortal 70s beige of the hospital waiting room, nor the beige of thick yet laddered tights concealing the varicose veins of the embittered nurse in attendance in the waiting room, nor yet the beige of the liver spots on the back of the crabbed hands of the coughing patient in the waiting room. IT IS THE BEIGE OF THE END TIMES. THE BEIGE THAT CONSUMES ALL.
All worldly beige is a mere shadow of the HORROR THAT IS SLASHDOT IT SECTION RADIOACTIVE BEIGE.
= Mazda = Volvo = Aston Martin = Jaguar
= Pontiac = Oldsmobile (dead now) = Cadillac = Saab
= Mitsubishi = Mercedes-Benz
= Chevy = GM (well, not quite -- Toyota rebrands the Cavalier in Japan, but otherwise there's little sharing between the two companies)
And this one is wrong. Volkswagen = Audi, but not Porsche. While it's true that Dr. Ferdinand Porsche started Volkswagen, and the Pieche and Porsche families have controlling interests in both the VAG (Volkswagen Automotive Group, including Audi, Bentley, and Lamborghini) and the PAG (Porsche Automotive Group, which is just Porsche), the Porsche car company is independently owned and is not part of Volkswagen. Parts and platforms are shared (the original 356 engine was a VW, as was the engine for the 914; the Boxster and 996 share relays and other mechanical parts with VW and Audi models; the Cayenne and the Touareg are built on the same platform; etc), but the companies are not the same. In all of your other examples, the companies are partially or fully owned.
And it's only getting smaller. Gone are the days of many different manufacturers (for example, the single company Audi, which is now only a part of a larger company, started life as four independent companies -- thus the four interlocked circles of the Audi badge), but even back in the early days of automotive development there was a lot of "cross-polination". For example, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche helped built a number of early cars long before he built the first Volkswagen (and even longer before the first 356). Among others, he did plenty of work for Mercedes-Benz and the German military (the Panzer Tiger was designed by Porsche). Porsche still does non-Porsche design work today, such as the engine on the Harley-Davidson V-Rod (this by the Porsche car company, and not the independent Porsche industrial design company).
That's not to say that the different badges don't bring something more to the table. I doubt you'd object that a Lexus ES500 is more luxurious than a corresponding Toyota Camry, or an Acura TSX compared to a Honda Acura. The platforms may be shared, but in many cases the "up-market" brand model will have a larger engine, better suspension (either tigher or softer, depending on the goal -- sports car or luxury car), fancier interiors (leather, woods, metals instead of plastics and vinyls), more options (navigation, sound options), etc. That's not always the case, since many Chevy and Pontiac cars are exact matches minus body cladding (Grand Prix and Monte Carlo, especially before the late-90s/early-00s body redesigns of the cars; Camaro and Firebird prior to the cancellation of the F-body line; Cavalier and Sunfire; etc), but Cadillac is GM's upscale brand, and it shows. The Cadillac CTS (not CTS-V) may be nearly identical to a Chevy Impala, but the CTS is going to be more luxuriously appointed. Perhaps not enough to justify the $10,000+ price difference, but enough to justify some increase in price.
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.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
- MbM
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.