My teenage daughters go through mobile phones about every six months, ignoring my protestations that I got mine in 1999 and it’s still going strong. (And it was in the Matrix – how cool is that?)
Their latest models have micro SD memory slots, and I was cajoled into finding them some cheap memory – then blown away at just how cheap it was. I mean £4.50 for 2 Gb. And that’s from Amazon themselves – or at least the company that does memory for them. Someone else is selling them there at 99p (though that is with a bigger shipping charge).
Two things amaze me. One is the old fogey thing (I can remember when 16k of memory cost much more than this) and the other is the way some shops just haven’t caught up. You can merrily pay £20 for the same thing from a high street retailer I won’t name to avoid their embarrassment. It’s not often you see that much variation in a commodity price.
I fell off my bike once, with my old Motorola semi-brick in an inner jacket pocket. I had a phone-shaped bruise on my ribcage, but the phone was fine.
In contrast, one measly little tumble into fresh Whistler powder last year and the fancy screen on my Nokia cracked slightly, making a pretty rainbow pattern and rendering the whole thing completely useless.
I’m not surprised by the variation in prices for essentially the same thing. My Dell Inspiron 6400 is a year and a half old and cost me more than £1300. My Asus Eee I bought in the January sales does 80 per cent of what the Dell can do but it cost £200. Okay, the Dell is more powerful, has a bigger screen and so on, but the Asus is robustly solid-state, much lighter than the Dell, is a great little i-surfer and super for writing stuff while on the move. Sure, the Dell would win out in the end, but is the difference worth £1100?
I think the answer is that a lot of the price I paid for the Dell was to use Microsoft XP and MS Office, whereas the the Asus is Linux and comes loaded with OpenOffice, which is just as good for what I want. The price differential goes to Mr Gates, not to any appreciable technological superiority.
I bought a 4GB memory card for my son’s PSP. At the local Target or Bestbuy it costs $50. I bought it on eBay, shipped from Hong Kong in the package, for $18 plus shipping and still saved over $10. It only took a week to get here.
It only took a week to get here.
Gigabytes come to he who waits. (Armaments 15, 63-66).
Brother Maynard!