As reported elsewhere, AMD has a new secret, 100-series Opteron pricing.
I guess they wanted to eliminate the “perceptual difficulty” of paying much more than the listed official price for certain products. Makes it a little easier to charge about $215 for an “officially priced” $125 if you don’t know it’s $125.
Or maybe they want to stem a new line of complaints now that the 2.2Ghz Model 148 has jumped up about forty-fifty dollars since we last looked.
Whatever it is, what a cheesy move! So typical.
It’s not like AMD’s official price has ever been regarded as sacred by the company throughout its history, especially when dealing with OEMs. Hell, they’ve even offered free CPUs for a quarter to get an OEM account, and free has certainly never been an official price. They could have set a higher official price, and offered discounts to the big OEMs.
It’s always a safe bet to assume that when somebody starts hiding something that had been public a long time, it’s because there’s something to hide. In this case, it’s almost certainly AMD’s inability to provide the OEMs and overclockers with enough chips at that price. In the Hector Ruiz Era, OEMs come first, second and third, so the scarcity gets passed onto the little guys.
Of course, there will be fanboys who’ll say why this is a good move, but let’s face it, if AMD started demanding a Brokeback Moment from you to get a CPU, they’d call that a brilliant business move, too.
I’m afraid this whole Opteron fiasco has taught AMD and their distributors a very valuable lesson at our expense (and maybe others, too): You can make a lot more money, money above and beyond list price, so long as the little darlings get (or can be gotten( hot and bothered enough by it.
And don’t think that lesson won’t be applied again and often in the future.
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