Over the past 7 years in the I.T. industry I’ve seen a lot; the coming and going of brands, swings in brand loyalties, and bad batches of products. Having to deal with product issues and warranties is part of the job but gives you an acute perspective of certain brands and products. Now not all brands or products are perfect however we have culled our range to reflect the brands and products that we have the least amount of issues with.
At iBuyPower Australia and PC Maniacs you will only see a small amount of brands; and most of the time you’ll find only a handful of the company’s product inside those categories as well. There are a few reasons for this, as mentioned above known issues with a brand or product make me wary of listing them. My businesses tend to cater for the mid-range to high-end user so it’s pointless for us to list many of the low-end items.
For arguments sake I’ll use AMD CPUs as an example. Right now we don’t sell anything AMD CPU related be it the CPU themselves or motherboards that support them; this is simply because Intel offers such a good deal on performance and price. I have absolutely nothing against AMD, I think their products are fantastic, however Intel have a better product in just about every way.
It hasn’t always been like this; once upon a time it was the other way around; back in the AMD Athlon64 days it was very hard to sell or recommend Intel CPUs as AMD had the upper hand for a good 2 years or so. These brand swings in performance/price have always been there and will always continue to occur, it’s these changes that affect the trends of our buyers and in turn effect the products we list and stock.
This swing is more common in the video card arena, with AMD/ATI and NVIDIA battling it out for the crown on a regular basis. Sometimes this crown changes between the two on a monthly basis, more often than not it’s a 3-6 month cycle. NVIDIA held the crown for most of last year with the GTX 285/295 but this changed in October of last year with the introduction of ATI’s HD5870 and shortly after the HD5970.
Shortly after this introduction most GTX 200 cards from NVIDIA dried up so I de-listed them on my websites. Both GTX 200 and HD 5000 series are great products but if we can’t get stock of GTX 200 cards then it is pointless to list them; with mid-range to high end user being our business this means that the categories are flooded with ATI based video cards only. This may change with the release of NVIDIAs GTX 470 and GTX 480 cards slated for (possibly) late March, only time will tell on this one.
Surprisingly I don’t get many emails asking for certain brands or products that aren’t listed on my websites. I’m quite OK with this as it shows that customers who want a certain brand or product that I don’t sell are already buying it from another reseller or understand that I only list quality components and chosen to purchase one of my listed brands, either way I don’t have to deal with any possible warranty or product issues from a brand we don’t feel comfortable selling.
There’s a reason I list the brands I list on my websites and it’s not because of some dislike for a company but a combination of quality, supply, warranty turn around and more. Computers just aren’t a job to me but a hobby and if a brand isn’t good enough for my system I feel it’s not good enough for yours.
About Rex: Rex is our first Featured Blogger on ShaneBaxtor.com and brings with him the knowledge and experience of working in the IT Industry the past 7 years. Owner and operator of two of Australia’s popular e-Tail stores iBuyPower Australia and PC Maniacs he’s able to offer us a perspective that most people don’t hear about.
