Hardware Is Dead — At Least Most Expensive Hardware Is 342
First time accepted submitter ze_jua writes "In this article, Jay Goldberg, a financial analyst who travels to Shenzhen several times a year, analyses the potential consequences of the very low cost of hardware he found there on the consumer electronic industry worldwide.
He wrote this piece of text after he found a very nice $45 Android 4 tablet. Are we so close to given-away tablets?"
Yep (Score:4, Informative)
A great area to look at it home audio. Time was, everything was pretty expensive. There wasn't really a cheap option. When cleaning out my grandfather's house my father found an old Allied Electronics catalogue from 1970. He and I had fun looking through it, and he found several items he used to have. They were around the lower end of what you could get from it, around $150 for a stereo receiver. That works out to about $900 today.
Well when you do some research you find that you can get $150, or even cheaper, receivers these days. However you can also get $900+ ones. I'm not even talking ultra expensive audiophile crap, I'm talking stuff you can get from Denon, Onkyo, Yamaha, and so on.
People buy these because in addition to more features you get better build quality and so on. A simple example is that cheaper Denons are built in China, the more expensive ones are built in Japan, because they can get tighter quality control.
While cheap devices are no doubt popular both because they allow people who could otherwise not afford them to have one and because many people look only at short term cost, that doesn't mean expensive devices go away. Some people want more than the cheap devices, or simply want something that will last longer.
Personally I'm quite a fan of buying better quality things to have them last longer. Not only do I like things being nice, but I find it actually costs me less in the long run since I end up replacing them less frequently.
Re:Absolutely. (Score:1, Informative)
Um, what? iPad marketshare actually went up during the past year [businessinsider.com].
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Absolutely. (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't read the article, did you? The author's argument was that businesses that sell pure hardware will struggle. He specifically singled out Apple as an example of a company that also sells integrated software, and therefore does not have this problem.
Re:Nope (Score:3, Informative)
One caveat: Bleeding-edge isn't always about bragging rights.
While Apple makes some monster profit percentages, things like Retina Displays, specialized metal (as in, not-plastic) cases that hold up to abuse a little better... these things do tend to cost more, both in the newness of technology (because not everyone has such things tooled-up and ready to rock on relatively large scales), and in having enough R&D put in to make sure you don't end up with a bleeding-edge-but-crap product (which Apple, while better than most, occasionally borks over too - as evidenced by the antenna thingy a couple of years back).
It's like buying the latest server model with all the top-spec goodies in it, as opposed to buying last year's model with somewhat lower specs. Of course they're going to charge you more for it. Question is this: is that extra 'oomph worth it to you or not? Sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't.
(Disclosure? No problem - I bought a brand-new dual G4 PowerMac back in 2004 - cost me bout $2k. I finally put it in the closet for good last year, with no failed parts, and the only system lock-ups coming from serious goofs while writing code. Meanwhile on the PC desktop side, I plowed through six motherboards (two of them because they blew up), four CPUs, four HDDs, two cases, way too much RAM, two copies of Windows (XP and 7 - skipped Vista), and two power supplies. Call it two $1200 upper-end Dell or HP boxen plus parts - just to keep up performance-wise (from look and feel, not necessarily from benchmarks). The only reason I put the Mac away was because the thing was finally too far out of tech (as a PPC box), and new programs/games tended to favor the x86 architecture a bit too much. Overall, I actually saved money on the Mac side. Then again, I don't buy main desktop boxen for the 'ooo - shiny' factor, but for the long haul.)
I guess what I'm saying is, sometimes it ain't for the bragging rights (though I admit I enjoyed whipping that beast out at LAN parties back in the day, only to have one monitor playing a movie while the games --Unreal Tournament and UT2k3&4 mostly-- ran flawlessly on the other).
Re:Not cheaper really, (Score:4, Informative)
With electronics, there's no such thing as "locally manufactured" for the most part. The best you can do is locally assembled, as it's possible to buy components here and PCBs and have them assembled in the USA (at a very, very high cost; I've looked into it; I think the military contractors are keeping the prices very high). But the components themselves (resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc.) are mostly made in Asia these days, with some things made in Italy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
When you get a phone on subsidy, you don't own the phone, you are renting it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I own the new phone I got over the weekend for extending my contract for another 2 years in the same way that I own my home, the only difference being that Il be making payments on the former until 2015, and on the latter until 2041. In either case, I own the object, and I get to keep it indefinitely following the end of the contract, as long as I make the payments.
One interesting affect of this is that both objects are covered for full repair or replacement by my insurance, which I wouldn't have to carry on them if they weren't my property (and I were not thus responsible for them).
So, no, my subsidised phone is no more rented from my my telco than the home that's subsidised by my bank is rented from them.