And again (from New york Times online): memory prices to rise
By TOM ABATE
c.1996 San Francisco Examiner
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SAN FRANCISCO - There may never be a better time to buy memory to upgrade your home or
office computer. Chip prices, currently scraping bottom, may soon be on their way back up,
industry sources say.
``Now is a good time to buy - and don't wait too long,'' said Jim Turley, a senior editor with the
Microprocessor Report newsletter in Mountain View.
Memory chips hold data and programs when a computer is turned on. In contrast, disk drives store
data when a computer is turned off. Just as it was once said you can never be too rich or too thin,
in the computer age, users can never have enough memory or disk space.
And according to all accounts, the price of precious memory had fallen almost 50 percent in the last
two months. The reason? Computer sales during Christmas were weaker than expected, leaving
PC makers with lots of unused memory. They dumped their excess chips on the market, cutting the
price of memory from about $50 per megabyte in December to about $25 per megabyte or less in
recent weeks.
``I picked up 8 megabytes of memory for my Pentium PC on Saturday and paid $123,'' Turley
said.
Memory prices have dropped by similar amounts for Macintosh systems made by Apple Computer
Inc. In December, eight megabytes of Mac memory sold for just under $400. Monday, the
MacZone mail order company in Seattle was selling 8 megs for $180. The Used Computer Store
in Berkeley was advertising the same price.
That was the good news. The bad news is memory prices at the wholesale level have already
started rising, which means the prices paid by consumers may not be far behind.
One electronics distributor in Santa Clara said that Friday and Monday the price his company paid
for raw memory had gone from $6 per unit to $7 or $7.50 per unit. Last year, the unit price of an
unfinished chip would have been $10.
``Prices have been down for six to seven weeks, but they may be starting up,'' said the distributor,
who asked not to be identified.
A salesman at a competing wholesale electronics firm in San Jose told the same story. Prices have
been depressed, but seem to be bouncing back.
``This is a volatile market, and it's going to get ugly quickly,'' the chip salesman said. |
