PriceSCAN Blog: January 2007 Archives

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Lexar For Less

Computers | Jan 24, 07

You now have one less excuse for not backing up your data or having extra digital film. In the last few days we've seen a sharp drop in the price of Lexar JumpDrives and SD memory cards.

Both the Lexar 1GB USB JumpDrive and the Lexar 2GB USB JumpDrive saw drops of around 30% in their lowest vendor prices on this site, from around $50 and $75 to under $35 and $50, respectively.

Lexar Media 2GB USB 2.0 Jump Drive Lightning 100x
Time Period: 7/4/2005 through 1/15/2007
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

Similarly, we've seen about a 25% decline in the lowest merchant-offered prices of the Lexar Media 1GB Secure Digital Card and the Lexar Media 2GB Secure Digital Card from approximately $40 and $60 to under $30 and just over $45, respectively.
So the next time your hard drive crashes or you can't take that extra photo for lack of memory, don't blame the cost of storage.

Posted by jeffrey.trester at 10:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Apple Inc.? – Doesn't That Have Something To Do With The Beatles?

Electronics | Jan 10, 07

Apple's announcement that it's dropping "Computer" from its name does more than tweak the house that John, Paul, George & Ringo built. It's an acknowledgment that Apple has become a technology lifestyle company, aiming to put its operating systems and media formats into all aspects of the personal electronic environment. No product introduction has made this point more apparent than that of the iPhone

The iPhone sports a 3.5 inch color screen that constitutes most of the face of the 11.6 mm thick "smart" phone (Jobs claims it's the thinnest such device on the market). In addition to being a phone and a two megapixel camera, it's also an iPod and fully web-enabled internet device, running Safari on OS X. To be available in June, the iPhone is slated to start at $499 for the 4 GB version, and stepping up to 8 GB will run you $599. Cingular plans to offer its service on Cupertino's new offering, which by virtue of its use of the GSM standard is a so-called "world phone", hence Apple's plans to sell the unit in Europe and Asia later this year. This phone has the same proprietary interface as other iPods, meaning it's compatible with all the speaker systems and auto adapters that utilize that feature. Thus the iPhone can only help extend the iPod's lock-in effect from media players to the broader consumer electronics market. However you feel about Apple, you have to admit this is a masterstroke, both in terms of product creativity and strategic thinking (for a contrasting example, see "zune (zōōn) v. To violently drop in price, esp. before the holidays.").
Right now about a third of music player sales are non-iPod, and some competitors are trying to out-slick Cupertino in the design wars (see "Cooler Vibez Than iPod?") But by extending iPod hegemony to the phone space, Apple has taken a quantum leap in terms of its competitive position. Fold in iTunes and you have to wonder what all this might mean in terms of overall dominance of media technology. Remember those "1984"-themed Mac ads? We may yet find out that the closest thing to a corporate Big Brother wears a black turtleneck.

Posted by jeffrey.trester at 8:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Do People Just Love SanDisk Flash Memory Best?

Computers | Jan 5, 07

Recent price jumps on SanDisk flash memory products have increased their already significant premium over seemingly equivalent products from Kingston.

The last week of December witnessed PriceSCAN.com listed vendors raising the price of key SanDisk flash products appreciably, while Kingston prices were either raised far less or, in some cases, sharply lowered. For example, merchants raised the price of SanDisk's 1 GB CompactFlash Card by an average of 6.5%, versus an average decline of 7% in the offered price of the similar Kingston 1 GB CompactFlash 33x Card. Similarly, the mean price of the SanDisk 1 GB Cruzer U3 USB Flash Drive shot up by an eye-popping 31% while the average price of Kingston's 1 GB Data Traveler USB 2.0 Flash Drive rose by only .02%. A similar pattern can be seen across much of the flash product lines of these firms.
What this means for SanDisk, Kingston, and the flash memory market is unclear. In a rational market, a persistent, sustainable price difference would argue for an actual difference in quality. If Kingston's devices are truly the functional equivalents of SanDisk's, one would expect the pricing of these two lines to converge. In an environment of strong demand, that could mean the rise in SanDisk pricing serving as a signal to Kingston and others, resulting in a general price hike. Of course, absent that firm demand, the new SanDisk pricing might not hold.