Whoa!! The peso has broken the 40 to $1 barrier! This is great news for all those creatures who want to buy parts or computers this December. Talk about timing!
Just when the Chips & Bits Entities began losing their hope in AMD K6-2's against the Celerons( both of them), we got a very valuable PC Options price list. We were blown away with the price drops that we saw with both AMD K6-2's and PII's: 350 amd above.( it is very interesting to mention that the K6s are not in the price list, probably because they are gradually being discarded by PC Stores in favor of the newer processors ). These drops may be because of the new "shipments" that the Filipino computer stores received. And maybe too, because of the increase of the the peso against the dollar, albeit temporay( hey! I picked that up on TV! ). And still, it may be that these products are kinda old and need to be phased out.
The PII 450 droppped to 19,000+ from 29,000+( October 8, pricelist ) and yet it is still the highest clocked processor out there ( this is very disturbing, since processors generally dropped prices drastically only when newer and more powerful processors come along ). This should serve as a lesson to those who rush and buy the most powerful procesors in the market. Unless you have too much money and find it difficult to get rid of it. It is best that you wait until a processor settles down and gradually drops to a more desirable price.
With the drastic drops in the K6-2's prices, the Celerons may soon loose a fairly large market share in the Philippines. The Chips and Bits Entities firmly believe that there is absolutely no comparison between the Mendicinos( 300A and 333 Celerons ) and the K6-2s, much less with the Covingtons ( 266 and 300 Celerons ). The 333 and 350 K6-2s both dropped their prices by about 5000 pesos! This is outrageous! With these prices, why would anyone even consider buying any other processor! Of course, application( business or office) oriented users will prefer the Cyrix's and the IDT's extremely low-priced processors. And speaking of low-price, these chips did not significantly lower prices since our last pricelist. Let's just say that, IT CAN'T GET ANY LOWER THAN THIS .
As expected, the motherboards did not drop prices significantly, again . These components seldom lower there prices anyway, maybe because stores buy them by the gazillions..hehehe. To our surprise memory modules( RAMS ) increased their prices. The Entities cannot find any logical reason behind this increase. The only thing we could think of is a RAM shortage. We expect memory modules to drop prices drastically in the near future. Harddisks prices are lower than they were b4, as they always drop prices slowly. On the average the harddiks prices dropped 200-300 pesos from their original price.
The same can also be said with sound cards, video cards, CD-ROM drives, monitors, etc.... These products change prices very slowly that it would take a few months to notice any significant price drops at all.
That's about it. This commentary is getting too long. Since TV news, says that the exchange rate will worsen next year, we advise that you buy a computer part or computer this December. Good night! And happy browsing!
October 30,1998
