On Fri, 23 May 2003, Patrick Kirk wrote:
> Actually its a lot cheaper to buy from PC World with Windows
> pre-installed. Buying components means paying for distribution,
> packaging, postage, etc. so it ends up being mor expensive than buying a
> box that was assembled in China by someone whose daily wages are less
> than the price of a first class stamp.
There are other tricks as well - using cheap components is the most
common one. Do you really know if that cheapo computer has its
brandname video card running at the same mhz as its retail counterpart?
"Video card" is probably an overstatement, its just a part of the
chipset stealing memory from the main system. Is that CL 2 or CL 3
memory? One nice 256 or 512MB stick or several smaller sticks which
makes upgrading less cost effective? A nice 80GB 8MB cache HDD or an
older 20GB HDD? How much buffer size is on the CDRW?
There is a volume in scale for the top-tier PC manufacturers, but they
face price lockins for that volume. Odds are, they are getting their
hardware for roughly the same price that the smaller shops are - and
sometimes they are paying more.
~ Jesse Meyer
--
...crying "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"... ~ HPL
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