Posted 09/26/09 at 05:10:39 PM by Justin Kerr

Trying to compete with a $99 iPhone is no easy task, but it is even harder when you’re more expensive than the competition. Palm was recently able to bridge the gap by reducing the price to $99 on Amazon, but Wal-Mart is obviously looking to sell a boat load of Pre’s by offering them for a mere $79.99 with a two year contract. Unfortunately this price can only be reached using the ever so sneaky mail in rebate approach, but if you’re on the market for a Palm Pre, it looks like Wal-Mart has the price to beat.

It will be interesting to see how pricing changes on the Pixi given how inexpensive its bigger brother now is. Is this the price you’ve been waiting for?

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Posted 09/06/09 at 04:14:59 PM by Justin Kerr

Avid bookworms will swear by their Kindles, but according to a new study released on Wednesday, e-readers will likely never go main stream as long as the price hovers around the current $199-$489 range. "The price points for how most consumers value e-readers is shockingly low -- for most segments, between $50 and $99," Rotman Epps said. "To reach the largest market possible, the prices will need to come way down." Currently the biggest obstacle to hitting the $50 price is the e-ink display itself which costs roughly $60 all on its own. Device makers can be expected to "look for alternative providers of displays if E Ink can't bring its prices down fast enough," Rotman Epps said.

Everything comes down in price over time, but to see the kind of growth that most companies expect, analysts expect e-reader manufactures to explore subsidy based business models, partnering with either network providers, or newspapers to help offset the cost of the device. Rotman Epps said its "a reasonable assumption" that network operators and newspapers will only subsidize e-readers if they can recover their costs by enticing consumers to sign up for long-term data plans that command monthly fees. "

The survey estimated that approximately two million e-readers will be sold in 2009 at current prices, bringing the total install base up to about three million by the end of the year. Forrester also estimates that this only represents about 12 percent of the maximum addressable market at the $199 price point.

What would you pay?

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Posted 07/26/09 at 02:53:22 PM by Justin Kerr

The palm pre has been locked in a heated struggle against Apple over iTunes sync capabilities, but everybody knew they still had larger obstacles to overcome, namely price. When Apple reduced the cost of their iPhone 3G to $99 at its last WWDC, many described it as a game changer. The Palm Pre is a great device, but given the maturity and runaway popularity of the iPhone, the debut price of $199 for a Pre was clearly a problem.

The good news for Palm fans that have been holding off on upgrading, is that you can now pickup a Pre for only $99 on a two-year contract. It remains unclear if this price cut will be permanent, but it should at least help spark sales temporarily and get more Pre’s into the market.

Is this the price point you were waiting for?

Edit: Best Buy marketing manager John Bernier has reported via Twitter that the Pre is in fact still priced at $199 and that the "error is being corrected." 

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Posted 07/01/09 at 08:30:54 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Asustek seems to have grown tired of the 7-inch and 8.9-inch Eee PCs in its inventory. Perhaps that is why it has decided to slash the prices of the said netbooks. The 7-inch Eee PCs are now available for a meager sum of $153 in Taiwan. The 8.9-inch Eee PC 900A has had its price trimmed down to $219 in China. Benson Lin, president of Asustek’s Asia Pacific division, had earlier this year told Digitimes that the company would completely phase out its 8.9-inch Eee PC netbooks in 2009.

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Posted 04/20/09 at 05:04:57 PM by Andy Salisbury

Only after a few months of being on the market, HP has decided to cut the price of the Firebird 802 gaming desktop by $500. The price cut includes a $150 cut to the base price, as well as a $350 instant rebate, bringing the $1,799 price down to $1,299.

For those that haven’t been paying attention to the Firebird since release, that $1,299 will get you an Intel Core 2 Quad 9400 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB HDD and two Nvidia GeForce 9800S GPUs, each packing 512MB of DDR3. Not to shabby considering the new price point.

If you’re interested in checking out the Firebird 802 for yourself, be sure direct your browser here, to HP’s site.

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Posted 03/23/09 at 03:00:12 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to DigiTimes, Intel is looking to release two new processor models, which would most likely drop the prices on their current releases by up to 20 percent.

The two new rumored chips are slated to release on April 19th, and both will clock in at 2.66GHz. The first chip, the Q8400 (95W) will cost $183, while its sibling, the Q8400S (65W), will run $245. The report continued to state that in late May further Celeron and Pentium Dual-Core processors would see their way to the market.

For a full list of all the rumored price cuts and releases, be sure to check out a full report here.

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Posted 08/21/08 at 12:31:08 PM by Chris Moody

Intel adds a few processors and drops a few prices this month in it’s CPU line up. There doesn’t appear to be any shakeups from Intel’s expected plans.

Intel's Core 2 Extreme Quad Core line remains unchanged, but in the standard line, the Q9650 joins the line up at the top, while the Q9550 drops 40% from $530 to the Q9450 previous level of $316. The Q9400 is also new, and enters at the same price as the Q9300 and Q6700 (a 65nm process CPU) at $266.

The only other prices changes were in the Xeon line, with the new X3370 coming out and the X3360 dropping 40% to $316.

All prices are in 1000 tray units.

We will certainly see more changes when Intel ships Bloomfield sometime in Q4.

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Posted 07/14/08 at 07:55:24 AM by Chris Moody

My trusty PC is long in tooth, and it’s 7900GT just no longer serves well enough for my gaming desires. I’ve taken to dropping items in my New Egg cart on the weekends and putting together my own Dream Machine, only to sigh and dump everything out when I realize that my wife would only strangle me for spending that much on anything short of diamonds for her. Hey, I live in Vermont, the women out here are tough.

Fortunately Nvidia has introduced new prices on the GeForce GTX 280 and 260 to be even more competitive with ATI’s line. The GeForce GTX 280 is now available for around $499. The GeForce GTX 260 is now going for around $299.

So maybe I can slip one of those into my current rig before she gets the credit card bill. After all it is better to beg forgiveness, than ask permission. At least I’ll have a nice new videocard to console myself with afterwards.

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