> > That's a good deal. It's heartbreaking when you look at prices a while after > you bought the item.. My heart goes out to anyone if ya paid too much for a > DVD burner a year ago.. they seem to be a quarter of the price now. Saw some > good Aussie deals for around AUD$230 and will probably have one by January. > 4.75Gb per disk! RAW? Bring it on! Oh.. there's the tiny issue of squeezing > a *ist D in the budget as well.. sigh
Now, of course, you can buy a *ist-D for $400 less than the initial price. And that's just in a couple of *months*. I expected the prices to stay high until the new year - if I'd thought prices were going to fall this fast I'd have delayed my purchase. Oh well. But in general it's never a good idea to track prices on high-tech equipment. Take disk drives, as an example. I've taken to buying a drive just a little smaller than I first thought of (I'd buy a 120GB or 160GB nowadays). By the time I get round to filling the space, and would be beginning to wonder whether buying a 200GB drive would have been a better idea) the cost of an additional 200GB drive will be less than the difference in price between the drive I purchased and the 200GB drive I didn't. (And with firewire and/or USB you don't even need to open the case to add a new drive, and it's easy to move storage to a new system when the time comes). I'm beginning to wonder, though, if this phenomenon is beginning to taper off. My four-month-old desktop system still looks pretty competitive when I take a look at the systems being sold in the local computer stores (most of which don't even put the fastest possible memory on the memory bus). And even my work-supplied laptop (which is over a year old) still looks pretty good; it's got over 80% of the features and performance that can be bought for 80% of the price we paid for it. By contrast, in the 18 months prior to that purchase laptop speeds had tripled, with corresponding increases in memory and disk size, and the standard screen resolutions and sizes increased too.
