A sign of things to come? --

... or is it already here?

Our desktop went kaput about a month ago and we never got it serviced because we were merrily using the Mac. Last week, we had free time so we decided to bring it to the repair shop. We were fairly optimistic, expecting to probably have a battery (CMOS) or a small part replaced or something cleaned -- when the technician called, he told us our motherboard is dead and we need to replace it.

He gave us several options --
#1 To replace it with a similar motherboard but that it would be "old stock" and not covered by any warranty

#2 To replace it with a more current motherboard

I know I shouldn't have been surprised to hear that our motherboard was already *ahem* obsolete, considering that it's only 2 years old -- but I was.

My initial reaction was to ask them to just take apart the PC so we could sell off the part and use that money to buy an iMac. I asked the technician if I could think about it and that I would call him back after an hour.

I decided to research on the current cost of the individual parts of our PC -- I was confident that we would be able to sell it for at least 15,000 pesos.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that the Kingston 1gb RAM (which we paid over 5 thousand pesos for) costs 1,800 pesos BRAND NEW! I thought Johann had made a mistake and misread the price -- but there it was, in black and white.

For our 2x 1gb RAMs, we were only going to get about 2,000 maximum.

I readjusted my expected price to 10k -- which, I later realized, was a mistake.

We also discovered that our optical drive, a Lite-On DVD-RW only costs 1,300 pesos brand new (and this is with better specs).

The biggest blow came when we checked for the price of our video card -- we were so proud to have gotten that video card and even had to wait for it to be released 2 years ago. Now, not only is it obsolete, people can't even sell it for 2,000 pesos. (We were offering it to a friend for that price and he told us he could actually get a better one for the same price. Ouch.)

I became really contemplative (and disappointed) at this point --

On one hand, my dreams of getting an iMac (now) had disappeared like the value of our PC. ~sniff~

BUT, on the other hand, I am really happy to see just how inexpensive this technology has become -- only at this period of our history can something like this become a reality.

I'm also very excited because it means that the techie things I plan to buy will be cheaper in the future.

Yay! ^_^