When I heard something on TV about getting an Phone for $50, I thought about the people I know who paid $600 for theirs. I am not an early adopter of new technology (unless it is free, of course), since I am old enough to remember Betamax. You might have to look that one up, since it is not on the list of the 15 Biggest Fails for Techies Who Bought the Wrong Gear Too Early. This is a slide show of things you may regret having bought when they first came on the market, because the price dropped, it became obsolete, or you can't upgrade the early models. Shown is the Amazon Kindle.
Maybe one day I will get around to buying one. Link -via Interesting Pile
The Kindle's transformation from luxury gadget to impulse buy isn't based on a single moment but rather on a series of price drops that broke the hearts of early adopters. If you bought a Kindle 2 in February 2009, it cost $359. Five months later, $299. Three months after that, $259. By June 2010, the Kindle 2 cost $189--and if you thought that was a good time to pull the trigger, July brought word of the Kindle 3, including a Wi-Fi model for $139. In less than a year and a half, the Kindle had become thinner, lighter, and $220 cheaper.
Maybe one day I will get around to buying one. Link -via Interesting Pile
Did the similar thing with 14 or 28k modems. Thankfully, I began to understand that these technical 'journalists' are not always experts and are paid by their magazines who are paid by their advertisers and that this 'never bite the hand that feeds you' relationship could have an effect on the integrity of the articles...
There are so many items.
Poor folks who bought non upgradable Bluray players only to then ask, "what? 2.0?". LCD or Plasma screen early adopters paid 10s of thousands more for TVs that are inferior to the thinner 120hz models available just a couple of years later. How about the multi core CPU fever that had folks throwing out their respectable 3GHz procs for an inferior 1.3? Since neither their OS or the programs utilized the other cores yet (and by the time they did, the tech had more than doubled again) these poor folks paid $1,000 for the latest and greatest only to discover that their older machines were faster (many did not notice this trick this because the new machine had the advantage of a clean install on a freshly formatted drive and therefor was still snappier than their poorly maintained previous machine).
1) Price drops are a bad thing.
2) Not all tech succeeds.
Don't agree with #1 at all. Already knew #2.
The next slideshow PCW recommended after this one was "Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures."
And for the ones that bought it before, I just can quote Nelson, the bullying guy from The Simpsons: HA-HA!
It would have been a much more interesting article if it were about tech items that were awesome on release date and got awesomer over time.
If you renew a $144 device in a year, or a $576 device in four years, you are operating on $12/month amortizations also.