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In computer news this week 12/10/2008

There has to be an economic correlation to Moore’s law in the flash drive industry – because soon they’ll be free prizes in cereal boxes.

Gordon Moore is an engineer who cofounded the Intel corporation – and he came up with his theory that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. He did that back in 1965 and his company the Intel corporation has maintained that pace for over 40 years. Basically it mains massive performance gains, but lower costs have always been a part of his theory.

Today you can buy a current hot intel chip – the dual core processor – for under $ 200, and you can buy a complete Dell computer with that chip for $ 428.

In today’s computer industry I wonder how anybody makes any money - particularly in the flashdrive industry, those little usb drives – some people call them thumb drives or flash memory - that everyone uses today for storage.

I bought a Sandisk 128K flashdrive at Costco in 2004 for $ 100, and I’ll compare this to an 8 Gigabyte Sandisk flashdrive I bought last week . In 2004 it would have cost me $ 1000 for ten of those to make a gigabyte and 8 gigs would have cost $ 8000.

In 2005 they came out with their first gigabyte flashdrive for $ 80, so 8 gigs would have been $ 640.

In 2006 I bought a 2 gig Sandisk flashdrive for $ 80, so 8 gigs would have been $ 320.

In 2007 I bought a 4 gig Sandisk flashdrive for $ 40, so I gigs would have been $ 80.

And last week I bought an 8 gig Sandisk flashdrive on a Christmas door buster special for $ 12.95......

In recent years locally we’ve seen national computer stores close up, as well as local dealerships, and people now buy computers as an impulse item at Costco along with beef jerky and big screen tv’s.

There are now more cellphones than personal computers in the world today, and my new cellphone can do email, text messaging, surf the web, access cloud computing applications, take hires pictures and movies, play music, get me unlost with its gps function, play games, and oh yeah I almost forgot – I can talk on it too. It was well under $ 100 with the rebate. And now for the first time I’m actually torn between whether I want to use my phone or my computer to do many of my daily tasks. .

It makes me wonder where it’s all headed, what it’s going to cost, and what’s going to do what.

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