I’ve been noticing that hardware companies are suddenly no longer putting out cheap products. Shuttle’s new XPC boxes have price points above US$450, the older models are up in price by 12%, and Asus’s new Terminators (T2-x models) are all Intel-based and cost about triple what the first-generation models did.
The AMD 64-bit CPUs are way up there in price, the prices of 32-bit Athlons haven’t dropped in six months (and in some cases have gone up) despite the rollout of the new 64-bit chips, and memory is about 10% more than it was when I bought my last box.
Buy a mac, they’ve stagnated for years and in my case, the transition from a 12inch rev A Powerbook to a rev C one has dropped. Plus you’re in Taiwan, so that unaffordable exuse no longer exists. Ah anyway, to each his own. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed any PC shift though.
Depends a lot on just where in Taiwan you live. Maybe Taipei is OK, but down here in Taitung there are no Mac dealers - nearest one is in Kaohsiung (150km or 3 hours away by train). That matters a great deal when you need spare parts. I generally service my own machines, and yes, even Macs need service occasionally. I owned one, and it just about drove me insane when I had to go to Kaohsiung to get a couple of screws that I had lost when opening the case to blow the dust out. And after making the journey, I found the shop was closed!!!
Of course, I’m talking about a desktop. For a laptop, a Mac might be OK since all laptops use proprietary parts, so you’ve got to go back to the dealer anyway for even the simplest repairs.
It seems as if prices are on the rise across the entire PC technology board lately. Recent jumps in prices on CPUs, long-term upward trends in memory, and now, hard drives are following suit. DVD burners, fortunately, seem to be on a somewhat lower incline at least for the time being.
Be certain to take a look at our RealTime Pricing Engine to see some of these trends for yourself and to find the absolute latest pricing information for optical and magnetic storage alike.