For obvious reasons, December is when the latest electronic gadgetry gets pushed onto the retail market. With the remarkable advancements in the past few years in chip making and related electronic design, there are some astounding items out there that are well within the reach of most gainfully employed people.
Recently I saw an advertisement for a DVD player, with the “upconvert” feature, for $35. There are some folks out there who still haven’t paid off their $299 machine. How can they possibly sell them that cheaply? Sure, they’re assembled in an Asian sweat-shop for pennies. But the cost of materials, packaging, ocean transport, import duties, domesting rail shipping, retail markup, etc., etc.
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Yesterday there was an ad for a “flash drive,” those little keychain devices that download a file and can upload to another machine via the USB connection. This little gadget, about the size of my thumb, stores 1 Gb of information and was selling for $10. This tiny little fingernail-size hard drive stores One Gigabyte! Eleven years ago when I bought my first PC, my brother was mightily impressed with the fact that it had 1 Gb of memory.
In recent years we’ve gone through the mass flooding of digital cameras, laptop computers and huge plasma TV screens. But I’m guessing that this year’s best-seller will be the digital video camera. Suddenly, those things are down to the size of a can of beans and priced under $500. And there are a lot of choices from the competing brands, making for good products to choose from.
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We’ll see if I’m right during the first week of January. Just check and see if YouTube suddenly has 45,000 clips of toddlers ripping open their Christmas presents.
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I think we’d better get the equipment checked now. I’ll go start the coffee pot.
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