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View Full Version : Same RAM on Crucial.com cheaper when buying from Mac?

usurp
2004-08-22, 03:16
My friend (pc/linux guy) is buying a second hand powermac off ebay. it comes with only 256MB ram and he wanted to get 512 more. so i straight away went to crucial.com (we were chatting on msn) to calculate how much it would cost and so did he on his end. then i told him it would cost 108 and he told me it would cost 112. then at the same time we both copy pasted the url where we were looking at.

both urls were the same. it was for an Apple PowerMac G4 800 (single) on curcial. except when i visit the link i see 108 and we he checks the link he sees 112.

Since my home server is a pc running windows i copy pasted the url there and to my suprise the price suddenly turned to 112. Its not a big difference only 4$ but its strange that crucial is doing this..

here are some screenshots

http://www.unex-t.com/pccrucial.jpg

http://www.unex-t.com/maccrucial.jpg
Eugene
2004-08-22, 03:32
LOL!

$118.8 in IE6 (XP)
$112.26 in Firefox (XP) and IE5.2 (OS X)
$108.99 in Firefox (OS X)
Maciej
2004-08-22, 03:38
That is dynamic pricing. A lot of companies are doing it, they track your cookies, and then price to match, competativley for some.. or not so much.
Eugene
2004-08-22, 03:46
That is dynamic pricing. A lot of companies are doing it, they track your cookies, and then price to match, competativley for some.. or not so much.
Yeah, Amazon did it for a while, but they got flack for it.

I blocked cookies and the price went down to $108.99. I erased my old Crucial cookies and the price jumped to $118.8...
usurp
2004-08-22, 03:54
so how do we get the lowest prices usually? blocking cookies?
i dont think this is a fair practice. ok i am getting a cheaper price cuz i am on a mac but imagine it was the other way around. i cant believe what i would do if amazon charged me extra if i purchased from a mac but cheaper from a pc.
Barto
2004-08-22, 04:13
How do the companies work out the price to charge? Do they think Mac users are smarter and will shop around?
Moogs
2004-08-22, 12:04
That is dynamic pricing. A lot of companies are doing it, they track your cookies, and then price to match, competativley for some.. or not so much.

I wouldn't be surprised at all by this. I had been watching the price of 512MB and 1GB PC3200 chips part of the spring and most of the summer and they fluctuated a lot... particularly over the last 30 days. It pays to check often / be patient. Instead of paying anywhere from $360 to $380 per 1GB chip (which is where they've been at most of the year), I paid about $240 net.

As for the Mac thing, I don't think so because the last thing I did after buying was to click the generic link for PC3200 and it was actually cheaper than the Mac-specific links I went through. So I called them to get a credit. I also notice that sometimes the machine you choose has an effect on price, even for the same type of RAM. It might be cheapest to actually click the generic links....