Flagship phone prices in Australia

This is a continuation from this post which I talked about the progress of my phone upgrade plans.

There are three ways you can buy a brand new phone in Australia.

Buy it with a plan

Buying it with a plan over a fixed period of time is the first option. This period is generally 24 months but you can find 12 month plans as well. This is also generally the more expensive option in the long run but you don't notice it much because there is no huge upfront payment. It's just a trick to fool the people who don't pay attention. However there was one deal recently launched by Woolworths Mobile (an MVNO which uses Telstra's network) which was cheaper than getting the phone (locally) with a similar plan. Sadly I missed out on it because I wasn't convinced the S7 Edge, the phone offered in the deal, was a good phone until last week when I got some personal time with it.

Buy it outright with local warranty

Buying it from the local market, paying full amount upfront as you would buy any other thing would be the second option. Generally this is cheaper than getting the phone on a plan and also gives you a lot more control over your choice of plan and termination of a plan. Also you get full 2 year local warranty. This even applies to iPhones. You don't need to get an Apple Care Plus warranty but one can argue that the price tag includes this. But expect to spend well over AU$1000 for a flagship model from any manufacturer. For example,  the Galaxy S7 is $1149,  S7 Edge is $1249 and the iPhone 6S 16GB model is $1079 (which is not recommended due to ridiculously low storage space.) When time goes by, especially when the successor is in the horizon, shops tend to lower the prices. mobileciti is currently selling the S7 for $1039 and the iPhone 6S for $989.  In addition to that, sometimes there are 20% off eBay deals where shops like Bing Lee and The Good Guys participate and they sell phones with Australian warranty. It’s worth waiting for these, if you are not in a hurry.

[Rant] Current RAM prices might make my mini-ITX dream just a dream

In a previous post I wrote how I relieved some good news from a forum member saying that the Silver Arrow Extreme cooler will fit in the Fractal Design Node 304. It just made the mini-ITX build somewhat closer to reality than just a dream. The next question I had was whether the PSU would fit in the case with the crazy number of cables sticking out of its arse. Nothing was confirmed although more people recommended that I bought a new smaller (140mm depth), modular PSU and sell the TX850 or keep it as a backup PSU.

I haven't decided what to do about the PSU issue yet, but a new problem just came up. I have Corsair Vengeance RAM (exactly the same as the ones shown on the picture above) in my current rig. They have very tall heat sinks which don't do anything to improve the performance. They are just there for the aesthetics. If those heat sinks come in the way of the cooler, I was thinking of removing the heat sinks and install them "naked".

Great plan, right? Yes, but I forgot one important thing. I have 4 sticks of 4GB each. 4 sticks!! Mini-ITX boards only have 2 DIMM slots. So I cannot use all 16GB of them in a mini-ITX rig. Ideally I would want 8GBx2 kit. I'm not going to halve the amount of RAM just to change the form factor. Which means I have to sell these RAM and buy new ones. Oh oh!

[Rant] The R9 290 prices are still dropping in Japan

Looks like Japanese people don’t really care about BitCoin mining. The demand for AMD graphics cards isn’t big in Japan. Thus the prices are dropping everyday.

As of today, the cheapest R9 290 card is priced at JPY44,980 or $450. Yes, this is still more expensive that the original MSRP of the card when it was launched in the US. Hey, everything doesn’t always work out the way you like. I should be happy that the price has dropped by $50 in a week. Not to mention, the prices in the US has skyrocketed in the last week or so. Now the R9 290 is priced at $500, if you can find any.

[Rant] How cheap would the G602 get?

Remember a while back I was considering getting a Logitech G602 wireless gaming mouse? I didn't want to get it back then because the prices were a bit too steep. I wanted to play the waiting game. Back then, the price of it was hovering around ¥8,000. I've kept a constant look out for price drops ever since and it is getting cheaper by the day - albeit few ¥ here and there.

Now the price of it is around ¥6,700 (as of 2013-12-06). That's a quite a nice price drop, right? I can get it now or wait for the prices to drop even further. It is just like buying stock. You never know when the prices will go up again. So you will have to make a decision at some point whether to risk waiting further or be happy with the current price and never look back afterwards.

You can take a look at how the prices have changed in the last 3 months by clicking this link.

Hmm.....

Since this is not a much needed upgrade, I've decided to wait. As I'm upgrading the display to a 1440p display (which has already arrived and am playing with it right now), there are more pressing matters like getting a faster graphics card because the GTX670 doesn't quite pull the pixels at the rate that I'm comfortable at. But that upgrade is also put on hold until manufacturers come out with non-reference designs for the R9 290 graphics card and also Mantle performance figures. I might still go with NVidia, but I want more options.

What so you guys think? Will it get cheaper? Or should I get it now?

Apple finally increases prices in Japan due to crappy exchange rates

The inevitable finally happened. Apple has finally increased the prices of Apple products, no thanks to the 25% drop in value of Japanese Yen. Previously the iPad Mini 16GB was ¥28,800 and the iPad 16GB was ¥42,800. Those are the only prices that I remember because rest of it doesn't matter anyway. 

What do you think the current prices are?    ¥32,800 for the iPad Mini 16GB and ¥49,800 for the iPad 16GB. Great! I didn't want their crap then, definitely not now. I'm sure the prices of MacBooks and iMacs have gone up as well. 

When I browsed from my home PC, the prices showed up in US$ even though I was correctly browsing the Japanese Appel Store. I double checked to see if I was browsing the US store by mistake. I was not. But when I checked it from a PC running the Japanese OS, I got the prices in Japanese Yen. I'm not sure if those prices got updates during that half a day period or if it indeed was because the PC was running a Japanese OS or locale was set to Japanese or the browser was Japanese. Doesn't matter, because I have no interest in Apple products. (Except the iPhone that is)

I only hope for one thing. iPhone prices not to go up. While I don't really like the iPhone that much, I don't have any other option. If Windows Phone was here, I would have bought one. (Not a low-end model though.) Sucks to be in Japan. 

P.S.

If you want to grab an Apple product for cheaper than the prices imposed by Apple Store, hurry up and grab yours from kakaku.com (iPad Mini: ¥29,900, iPad: ¥46,800) before the prices don't go up. There is no time to lose.