EVIL HP

HP is a well known brand for electronic devices such as laptops and printers.

I personally owned a HP 3in1 multi-function however it's now broken down and I have startd to search for a new one.

Only then I realise the "evil" marketing strategy adopted by HP. It's commonly known that specific printers will require specified model of ink cartridges. So the common sense strategy will be either selling the printers at a higher price but with a lower price in ink cartridge or vice versa. HP followed the latter. HP printers are sold much cheaper among the other brands such as Epson or Canon. The price is as low as 30+ to 40+ which also comes up with new colour and black ink cartridges. Because it's not a large expenditure the consumers rarely devote time into information search since the opportunity costs will be too high. So a buyer like me, especially a first time buyer, was rather uninformed about the general price of its ink cartridges. When I realised I fell for HP's "trick", it's already too late. I was in a dilemma of either buying a new printer or a new cartridge since a cartridge is equivalent to half the price of a new printer.

HP knows pretty well that many consumers are not inclined to throwing their old printer away after the ink is used up. So many will still stick to buying it's specified ink cartridges even though in a long term perspective it might be more economical to buy a brand with cheaper ink.

The low price of HP printers actually captured buyers' attention at very first sight with many purchase decisions are made instantly and what goes on will be the endless vicious cycle set up by our "kind" print manufacturer.

The new Macbook Air

Here are some pictures of the new MacBook Air:

A lighter, smaller and sleeker laptop which combines the knowledge and expertise Apple has learnt from its iPad and iPhones.

The craze for Apple's products have been continuously growing for which I attribute the success to its really cutting-edge technology as well as the highly futuristic designs.

Macbook Air alone doesn't really contribute to such a sharp growth in its sales. Steven Job, the CEO of Apple, knows that a really successful product has to be valued added by some other means other than its appearance. It is clearly that MacBook air doesn't really have impressive hardware specifications other than its long battery life.

So the new Air offers incredible 30 days of battery life when in the standby mode and works up to 7 hours. The booting process involves only 12 seconds for this ultra-light laptop from Apple. All of that are way ahead of those conventional laptops.

It is rather apparent that it doesn't focus on whole lots of evaluative criteria but just the concept of "portability". So all new features converge to the idea of portability, meaning smaller, lighter, and more lasting without frequent charging as well as an attractive and userfriendly operating system that is way better than its counterparts. It also futher added its value by coming with new audio and media softwares such as iPhoto and iMovie.

Furthermore, it is considerate of Apple to provide an USB drive OS installer which enables the users to re-install Operating System on their Airs without the need to connect to an external CD/DVD drive. The lack of a cd-drive for laptop now doesn't not really possess as much problems as years ago since faster internet and other storage devices are quickly replacing CDs and DVDs.

Post purchase dissonance

Post-Purchase-Dissonance by my friend XiangRong http://blogs.ubc.ca/tonyteng/2010/10/07/post-purchase-dissonance/

He made a good comment on the system here in Canada. The returning policy in most shops actually speed up the decision process of purchasing as consumers are psychologically less worrying about making a wrong decision. They still have a short period to consider if the value really match the price.

The pros is that users may ended up buying their products since they thought they still have many days to revert their decision. However most of them did not really consider the opportunity costs involved. They did not realise that returning the products actually takes time as well as transport costs. So, many ended up not returning.

It is interesting to note that the newest Sony Vaio laptop E series are actually selling good in today's saturated laptop markets. I ascribe all success to the series' striking designs and I did fall for it and bought one. However, I found it annoying when sony soon came up with E2 series, and then E3 series and who knows how shortly will the next model to be released.

Slowly they added in new colour as well as better specification. It's is normal to think that sony has actually fooled the consumers if given equal price since it makes the buyers to think that their products have depreciated in value in such a short time..However, it's smart of Sony to actually not changing the appearance at all, other than some new colours. The new series are actually priced higher than those older model. So it makes the previous buyers to think that their laptops' price to value ratio are still similar to that of the newly released E series. So buying sony's products seem to have slow depreciation. It thus solves, in certain extent, the post purchase dissonance for consumers even with new and faster models coming out in just short while.

Sony's E series laptop did stand out among the others due its unprecedented striking designs and colours. With successful pricing, Sony will definitely grab a large share of today's laptop market.

Marketing Strategy for Graphics Card

Graphics Card is an expansion card whose function is to generate output images to a display. Many video cards offer added functions, such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, video capture, TV-tuner adapter, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, FireWire, light pen, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors (multi-monitor). Other modern high performance video cards are used for more graphically demanding purposes, mainly for graphics demanding PC games.

There are hundreds of graphics cards in the market right now, ranging from 50 bucks all the way to over a thousand. This market is segmented according to different type of users. Business computers do not really require high performing graphics card instead, they need stable graphics card which are low in power consumption as well as low temperature while working. High performance cards can use up to 10 times more power than an on-board/in-built graphics card.

There is a weird trend in graphics card designs when they are meant to be installed inside computer casing that make them not visible to the users. So why all sort of fanciful designs?


Low-end graphics card usually are simplistic in terms of looks while high-end graphics cards are usually made as futuristic as possible which imply the technology level it contains. This is because dedicated graphics card are usually sold separately and their designs are one of the first things user come across in making a purchase decision. So it’s a type of value creation which I think is rather effective since psychologically, a hardware fan like me will choose the one with cooler design even though I can’t really see it after I installed it into my computer casing. One of the graphics card producers, Blue Sapphire, has created its symbolic colour and designs which usually involve “alien-technology-like” or futuristic blue o colored designs (or red colored for its previous generation of graphics card) and it has actually successfully created affection for its products among the consumers. While other cheaper brands without too much fascinating designs tried to lower their price so that their products is positioned correctly in the market with a reasonable money to performance ratio perceived by the consumers and thus still able to compete in the market.

CPU market

I am a computer hardware lover. I will make sure I am updated with all newest computer technologies and hardware releases. CPU is the first category of hardware that I paid attention to, from Pentium 1-4, all the way to duo-cores, quad-cores, and even to 8-cores.

However, understanding CPU requires a lot of contextual and background knowledge about hardware’ architectures and its corresponding performance testing platform. Most consumers are rather negligent about that and what they will do when they are buying laptops are either asking for help from the salesperson or consult friends who really know about computer hardware.

Taking the most recent example, Intel’s new generation of Mobile processors, the i-series, there are many models available on market each with slightly different architecture as well as the main clock speed measured in terms of frequency.

For Mobile i3 series, such as i3-330m (2.13GHz), i3-350m (2.26Ghz), i3-370m (2.4Ghz), and i3-380m (2.53Ghz), each of them appears to have faster speed in ascending order. There are many online hardware sites that consistently test the performance of each CPU model and they reflected about 5% performance increase with each model. This has found out to be a type of marketing strategies adopted by Intel for which Intel pay those websites for promoting their newest products by keeping the consumers informed. However, this also appears to be another marketing strategy for me as the laptop prices did not really change over the years, what changes is actually the model of CPU installed. Every 2 months or so, Intel will come up with a newer model with a higher speed frequency speed which kind of showed an improvement in the technology. However, most hardware lovers will know that it’s just a trick performed by Intel. The fundamental architecture of all i-3 series has not changed. In order words, what Intel did was just stabilizing and adjusting the clock speed slightly higher than before and declared them as if they were newer technology. Intel understands well that consumers wanted to buy things with newer technology and they wanted to see an improvement over time as compared to the older model.