Online History Of Computer Component Prices? 20
jtdubs asks: "I was pricing out computer components today and stumbled across an idea for a Web site. It would be nice to be able to query a database by product type (CPU, RAM) or brand (INTEL, AMD, Corsair) and be able to get graphs of each of their products and a graph of their respective prices over time. It could be helpful for determining when price drops will occur or for analyzing how new product releases affect pricing and would just be generally neat. Does anything like this exist already?"
Ratios might be better (Score:2)
What would be better would be more of a Consumer Guide that compared like things and tracked them, for example: Live and Historical information across manufacturer and model lines for $/MB of disk drive. Seeing what a historical low is for storage, and the current price range, might be a good thing.
Of course, for disk space, the historical chart will still trend downward, but not so for memory (atleast not lately.)
If this site also gave links to buy cheaply on the net, even better.
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Slight problem (Score:4)
RAM and CPU Price Indexes (Score:1)
Yeah, it exists. But.. (Score:1)
Not for free. Not yet.
This is the sort of analysis that industries typically do on themselves, and occasionally that trade publications turn into a USA Today-style chart to fill out an issue, or to illustrate an Op-Ed piece. Thus far, the raw data is not publicly available. At least not electronically. You can always go through Computer Shopper with a scanner/OCR. :)
Your big difficulties will come from decisions as to how specific you get and how long you track prices. How many variations on the Pentium processor are there? MMX, Pro, II, III, various Celerons... all the different clock speeds. I can still get my hands on a P200MMX, but the prices vary depending on the cluefulness of the folks at each "remarketer". In the secondhand market, local supply demand curves play a stronger role because prices are so low that it doesn't pay to ship too far.
Do you want to track components as individual commodities, or include integrated systems? What about the incomplete systems that you can pick up at the monthly blowout at the fairgrounds? You know, the white boxer run by the recent Eastern European immigrant. No hard drive means no Micro$soft tax. How do you compare those against complete Gateways? What about MSN/AOL rebates?
Sure, it is do-able. But you'll need to do a lot of thinking about data acquisition / organization / cleaning.
Graphs on Streetprices.com (Score:3)
Related to Product life-cycle.. (Score:1)
I'd have thought that component prices would be pretty closely linked to the product life cycle. (Pretty standard bit of marketing theory, have a google for it if you want to know more) As demand increases at the beginning of a product's life, prices are high, to cover development costs and shortage of supply. As the product matures, the price will stabilise to one that the market supports for a given supply/demand equilibrium. And then prices fall as the product wanes, and is superceded, only to rise again if the product becomes an antique. (ie, if demand begins to outstrip supply once more)
The key difference with hi-tech components is the extremely quick life-cycle. A component could easily be a huge success and make loads of cash, yet be dead within a year. This makes it a lot harder to track exactly what is going on with the price than with other products. (I mean, there's never any great fluctuation in the price of washing powder, for instance)
I'd expect all of the major component manufacturers to be doing analysis of this sort - since it's in their interest to set their pricing model to reflect the appropriate stage in the life-cycle that a given product is at. Especially during the later stages, when mature products will be used as cash cows to fund future developments, which should be launched to co-incide with the natural death of the replaced product. (In the ideal world, natch!) If they're not doing this, then they're very silly! (But I doubt that anyone outside the companies involved would ever get to see it, since it'd be crucial for product launches / deadlines - even specification creation....)
Great Idea!!! Buuuuutttt.... (Score:2)
You can find charts for specific products by doing a 'Webferret' search - but then you're only talking about street prices, which are beaten daily on the internet, and are really only 'guide prices' for most products on the high street.
If you're buying, your best bet is to cross reference a list of available components with sites like:
Streetprices.com - perhaps one of the best sites [streetprices.com]
cnet - does some price comparisons [cnet.com]
If you're still doing research then why not go to some of the component-specific sites on the web, such as http://www.motherboards.org/ [motherboards.org] and the like. They often have articles that deal with price fluctuations. Your fav computer mag.'s web site no doubt also has a littany of articles on the subject with decent research in them.
But methinks the resource you're after would be valuable to marketing students more than anyone else - if that's your thrust then I suggest you go to the manufacturer's web pages ( should you be trying to get geeks to do your marketing project for you?
8)
Re:I searched the blue sheets... (Score:1)
It could be applied to auctioning large blocks of hardware. For instance, they could start an auction for 20 GeForce 64MB graphics cards at $400 FOB to be shipped three months from the auction date (of course prices would rise in the auction). Payment would be made at the close of the auction. Offer the option to adjust the shipping date for a fee/credit.
Something like this couldn't realistically be carried out at the retail level, and I doubt it would work at the system level, either, though.
RAM and hard drives might be the best suited for this sort of thing.
256mb DIMM for $2000.00 (Score:1)
The RAM market in the US for a long time has behaved like a commodity, with prices rising and falling with news of disaster or delay anywhere in it's fragile supply chain process.
Two other examples besides RAM are hard drives and network equipment: I mean, everything's switched and you can get an external 80g firewire drive (5400 RPM granted) for under $400. That's a TB for under $5000. I never quoted anything over a 2gb RAID in '95, which, btw, was about $5000.00, cost.
Let's also break it down to the base unit... cost per megabyte, cost per port (10/100/1000 switched or not) including the NIC in the client.
How much longer is this technology game going to continue? How does the impact of new technology have on pricing? How long before there's a processor, RAM, and NIC in EVERYthing? What if there's already a significant shift that has begun that this historical clearinghouse might shed some light on? my2
Re:I searched the blue sheets... (Score:1)
Auction off the right to buy a 256MB PC100 DIMM three months from now for x dollars. If in three months, the market price is less than x, the option isn't exercised, the company's made some money and can sell the DIMM at the market price. The buyer of the option is only out for the value of the option, and can buy it at market if they see fit. The situation is reversed of course, if the price is greater than x. Then the company's out of a few bucks on the RAM (though the sale of the option may outweigh it), and the buyer has probably found themselves a great deal.
Must include software as well ... (Score:1)
It is appropiate to compare older technology with today's prices, be it cars or computers. People bought the appropiate technology at any era, and hey, it matched (sort of).
The price cycle (Score:2)
I think this idea is sound, but there are so many products and so much turnover I think you'd want to aggregate somehow -- keeping with the tape drive example, look at a graph of 80MB, 120MB, 640MB, 1.2GB, etc. drives, and see the average/median/whatever price over time for a given technology, possibly with some correlation to quantities manufactured/sold.
Sounds like a great economics project for school... I think there's definitely a pattern in all of this, but how to winnow it out? Anyone work for a big distributor with access to old price databases?
Who cares? (Score:4)
The switch in price is useless. There is so much that needs to be thought about.
For example:
Price can't tell you how good something is, or even garantee its future, unless you look in the long run over many similar products. Such as memory, but keep watching as the standard moves, EDO got cheaper until SDRAM took over, then PC100, etc... Overall Memory was over $40 a meg just a few years ago, and is now closer to a half-dollar.
There are certain things that can be pointed out, overall after December prices fall, but do you really need a graph to show that?
If you're looking for day to day prices, so many stores vary, it's hard to show a graph of that. You just have to follow it yourself.
Re:The price cycle (Score:1)
I searched the blue sheets... (Score:2)
On the other hand, this might represent an opportunity. I wonder if electronics manufacturers have considered selling futures on their products, and if there would be willing buyers? Might be a way to provide up-front financing to smooth cash flow for the parts maker, and provide a guaranteed supply to parts users.
The electronics industry may be too vertical for this, however, with a lot of the consumer equipment companies owning parts manufacturers.
Intel CPU prices (Score:1)
Re:The price cycle (Score:1)
CPU Intel Celeron 400 MHz, 128KB cache retail box $319.00
CPU Intel Pentium II 450MHz/fan/heatsink $999.00
IDE HDD Fujitsu 3.2GB MPC3032AT, 5400RPM $250.00
They were only March 1999... but I'm sure people have them going back a lot further..
Past performance is not an indication of future... (Score:1)
Yes, it's a metallic disc, with easily distinguishable faces. You flip it, and correlate the result with a pre-designated mapping eg Heads, I buy now, Tails, I wait.
What I'd like to see is a graph of performance against price (ie backwards) as it appears that price stands almost still, and you progressively get more for your money over time.
Re:The price cycle (Score:1)
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Re:I searched the blue sheets... (Score:2)
What I don't know is the extent to which JIT or similar business methods have been implemented in larger electronics manufacturing. Could be that the parts producer runs smaller lots and scaled to order.