On 02/22/2018 02:34 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
I sometimes wonder why people don't have a better understanding of economics. There are always (at least) two possible economic reasons for things like this.
No, there isn't really an alternative explanation. Manufacturers stop producing a certain technology if the market shrinks below a certain size that it's no longer viable to manufacture and sell a product. In the end, companies make products and sell them because they want to earn money.
Now we're at the tail end; the technology to produce writeable optical media is easy, commonplace and there are all to many manufacturers of 2nd and 3rd grade product. The street price of clone DVDs is around $5/1000. Yes they have a failure rate between 1% and 5%, but so what? Some of that the software can route around, some it just 'try the next one'. Heck, notebooks at the dollar stores cost more, per page, than that.
You can expect the retail stores to have a 100% price mark-up. The whole supply chain probably has a 500% mark-up. Competing with those prices who wants to be in the business?
I don't see how that contradicts anything what I have outlined before.
Also, more and more computers you buy these days don't even ship with an optical drive anymore.
Again, look to economics. When it comes to laptops, they are being made thinner and lighter -- that's the way the market goes -- and hence batteries are thinner and lighter but the operating lifetime must be sustained or increased. My Older HP/Compac x6000 (that now sits under my desk and run MySQL to support web services) had what, 4 USB ports, HDVI, audio, a cluster of card slots, AND a CD/DVD drive. It also had a hunking thick battery, two fans but still ran hot and the whole thing was heavy. It was everything that today's market isn't.
Yep. And one of the reasons why people don't have a problem with laptops being thin and coming without an optical drive is because the majority of customers download their software these days instead of buying a box with the software on CD in a retail store.
Yes, today's machines are just as expensive, and in many ways you're getting less for you money; just a faster cpu, a better screen to display the more eye-candy of the more space and cpu-power consuming software. No wonder some of the old-timers on the openSUSE lists are turning away from Gnome and KDE and all their hungry eye-candy to the simpler, cleaner XFCE.
I'm not sure how this is related?
As for PCs, well it's the same economic argument as the airlines. They sell 'stripped' models and charge extra for the 'add-ons'. Not enough disk, not enough RAM, not enough video; but just enough to run ... And the airlines charge extra for luggage, for meals, for headphones. They are now taking away the seat-back screens an making it a BYOD, but you can bet they are going to charge for power hookups and the movies will will become pay-for. Like the man said, "it's the economy". Or rather profit margin.
And they can only do that because the majority of consumers doesn't care about these features no longer being part of the standard feature set.
I don't think that looking to economic explanations rather than technological ones to explain market shifts makes me an old fart or anti-technologist.
Well, the economic shift is a result of technological development. 25 years ago, the average internet connection speed what people had at home was as fast as 33kBit/s. Nowadays, the majority of users have much faster internet connections and hence installing software from local media is usually no longer necessary. Again, I'm not saying that there aren't any users for optical media left. But refusing to accept that the market has dramatically shifted away from them would not reflect reality. Adrian -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org