Re: cards cost

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

John Townsend <utownje@lexis-nexis.com> wrote:

>Bart wrote:
>
>> If I go down to Circuit City today and buy XYZ PCI card for my Wintel the
>> average cost is $30-$120 REGARDLESS of the kind of card.  IF I find a
company
>> even selling an A2 card, average cost STARTS at 250 bucks and has for 20
>> years!  Why?
>
>I'm sure that the forces of supply relative to demand have always factored
into
>it, but even more than that I think that PC users have benefitted greatly in
>recent years from the economies of scale.  Circuit boards have a fairly high
>initial fixed cost to design and develop and a relatively low incremental cost
to
>produce, so if you don't make very many of them the cost per unit goes up
fast.
>Even in its heyday, the Apple II didn't sell anywhere near as many units as
PC's
>do now.  Cost of production has also gone down, so it's probably not fair to
>compare today's prices to those 20 years ago, but even for someone wanting to
>develop new cards for the Apple II today, dealing with the economies of scale
>would be a major hurdle.  Still, ///SHH Systeme (as one example) is able to
sell
>some good new cards in the $70 to $120 range.

I agree.  The IIGS is a niche market.  In the PC world, a 500MB
hard drive for $79 would be very expensive, but in the IIGS world,
it is amazingly cheap.  In fact, it is not only cheap today where
the IIGS is basically a collectors machine (even those of us who
actually use it are "collectors" in a fashion because we are so
few), it is cheaper per MB than any hard drive in the history of
the Apple IIGS because you get 500MB and you don't need to
buy an extra controller.

We as IIGS users have to put things into perspective.  If we want
new hardware, we are going to have to pay more than the
equivalent hardware on a PC simply because our market is so
small.  It all boils down to if we want that Focus drive, that
BlueDisk card, or that Sirius RAM card.  The prices are
reasonable given the market.

You can't expect to buy a wheel for your classic model T for
the same price that you pay for a wheel for your 2000
Pontiac GrandAm!