RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Obsolete hardware

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Spurling, Shannon wrote:

> Oh, it's got to be worse than that. More like:
> 12,800
> 3,200
> 800
> 200

I really don't think it is quite that steep, except maybe for 
things like a gob of disk space or something.  50% depreciation per 
year has done a surprisingly good job for my predictions on this 
stuff for several years now.
 
> Most computers are "Obsolete" within 3 years, and their price has gone
> down into the $300 and below dollar range by then.

OK, but that makes sense:

$2400   # new price
$1200   # one year after
$600    # another year after
$300    # year 3; bargain special.

> The $800 P3-700's that sold back in 2000, are now worth less than $200
> now. 

Uh...

2000    2001    2002    2003
$800 -> $400 -> $200 -> less than $200.

Again, I see nothing much wrong with my price curve. :-)

> And the more expensive the hardware, the quicker the price drops.

I think that's true for big disk drives and such, or maybe a truly 
over-priced engineering workstation back when they made those and 
before commodity PCs took over, but I'd want to see more specific 
examples.

> It seams almost exponential. The only exception to that rule is
> Mac and other specialized hardware vendors, like SGI, SUN, etc...

Macs certainly do retain their value longer, in large degree
because, until *very* recently, you weren't buying them for
state-of-the-art speed but for their usability in a particular task
domain, and they did age quite well in their niches.  But even those
depreciate pretty rapidly.  An iBook that cost $1500 in 2001 is
probably down to $400 today, and that much only if the OS is up to
date.  It will be interesting to see if Macs continue to do well in
depreciation these days.  On the one hand, OS X 10.3 is *faster*
than previous versions, keeping the "obsolete" hardware useful
longer.  On the other hand, you can now finally get (say) a very
competent new iBook here at Mizzou for under $1K before tax, so
something 2 generations back will have to become cheaper than it 
could be before the Mac price differenential was higher.  I think 
the price differential has gone down, by the way, because the MS tax 
has gotten relatively larger as PC prices go down.

jking

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