Recommended software at recommended prices

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Two money-saving opportunities have come to my attention today for software that I have recently reviewed and recommended. As they just might save you £1,500, I thought I should pass them on…

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Adobe’s bargain UK pricing?

Friday, February 6th, 2009

The argument can certainly be made that Adobe’s various Creative Suite offerings provide good value for money – assuming that you make full use of every component. However as I wrote in my review “they certainly don’t come cheap. At least not in the UK”.

What was so galling was the disparity between UK and US pricing. Comparing the UK and US prices for the full Master Collection – £1969 (£2264 inc VAT) and US$2499 – I pointed out that ”even with sterling at a two-year low against the dollar, at the time of writing that should equate to a price of around £1350. That’s a saving of over £600 before VAT – over 30% – enough to pay for a transatlantic trip.” Our esteemed editor,Tim Danton, had been so incensed by the pricing difference for Acrobat 9 Pro Extended that he started a rip-off pricing campaign. 

Well things have certainly changed since then and suddenly Adobe’s current UK pricing is looking something of a bargain…
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The inexorable bang-per-buck conveyor belt

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

While I was packing away after last month’s CPU Megatest, I came across an old Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955, left over from a previous Labs. It runs at a blazing 3.46GHz, and when we reviewed it back in Issue 146 it was one of the fastest processors around. At around £650, it was also one of the most expensive.

I was curious to see how well this veteran CPU had aged (and it’s not like I had anything else to do this week), so I dropped it into our testing rig and kicked off the benchmarking process. A few hours later, the results were in: the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 had scored 1.19. That’s far from disgraceful, but today, you can get a CPU that achieves that sort of score for as little as £90. To put that into context, I’ve tweaked our CPU graph (click for full-sized version) to show how the 955 would fit into the mainstream market if it were launched today.

If you take any sort of interest in computing – and let’s face it, you’re reading the PC Pro blog – you’ll have seen similar scenarios play out many times before. I remember my father paying £100 (around £350 in today’s money) for our first family computer, a Sinclair ZX-80. A year later, the ZX81 appeared, costing half as much and bringing numerous technological advances, including floating point arithmetic and a screen that didn’t go blank every time you pressed newline.

A more recent example: three months ago, I reviewed the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F hard disk. I liked the drive, but felt that at £185 it was too expensive. Today that drive is selling for £96. Now it looks like a bargain – but of course in another few months we’ll be looking back at the days when we used to pay £100 for a terabyte drive and laughing at how naïve we were.*

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