Well, well, well. I went into town a few days back and I was just randomly browsing around shops when I found this Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo laptop (note: not a netbook) selling for 350€ (about 500$, and 307£). This in a way shocked me, considering that while the specs were not amazing, my laptop that I bought a year ago (which was an entry level laptop) costed around 600€.

While obviously, Ireland is more expensive than countries like the UK and the US (something like the second most expensive country in Europe) I'm wondering if this is part of an overall trend throughout the world of prices for computers generally falling.

Now, some of you are bound to quote Moore's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law) which basically means that computer chips become smaller and smaller, and also more powerful, however for the past five years or so, prices remained fairly steady in the laptop market in Ireland. I attributed this to manufacturers raising the specs even for entry level machines. So while you could in theory get a crap laptop for 200€, there wasn't one on sale anywhere.

The specs for this esprimo lie at:

OS: MS Windows Vista
HD: 250 GB
RAM: 2.4 GB
Processor: 2.8 GHz
Graphics Card: Intel GMA

^^Not amazing, granted. But not bad either. If I was to buy this, I'd install Ubuntu on it which, with version 9 is really, really fast.

Thoughts

In my town computers and laptops are expensive!!!!!!!!
I bought a laptop 4 month ago 600$ and yesterday i saw the same at the same prices....
Iasked my friends to and no mater the economic crisis the computers are the same.........

my one year old pc is being replaced by new machines that do the exact same thing but run Windows 7 instead of vista. and the new ones are twice as much.