RD-83 wrote:Seems its "anti prime day" for Amazon's computer component department. The 1080 ti's have rocketed. Some are over £800 now
(they were sub £700 yesterday, I checked..)
Here in the US, they only offered an old GTX 750 2GiB (non-Ti IIRC) for around $100. I paid just $139 for a GTX 1060 3GiB several weeks back. The only other offering was for an old 8400 GS (PCI?). Really, really pathetic.
On the other hand, I got my wife a 5.9" Huawei Mate 9 for US$449, which I totally didn't expect. My wife loves larges phones, and with the 5.7" Honor 8 Pro not coming to the US**, she's been sticking with the lower-end 5.5" Honor 6X (and Honor 5X as a backup). But now she doesn't have to.
**Since over 90% of Americans get their phones "subsidized" from their carriers with long contracts, despite costing far more (we Americans are horrendously poor at elementary finance -- insert housing boom-bust of 2003-2007) ...
► Show Spoiler
Huawei-Honor has basically all by stated they will continue to shun both the mid-range and high-end US market, and I don't blame them.
nVidia ran into the exact same problem in 2014, unable to sell their Shield Tablet because Apple, Google and Samsung control the distribution at not just the carrier, but the retail counter, in the US. nVidia tried marketing it as a 'gaming tablet' so it could sell via the game stores, and AT&T included a SIM (but didn't subsidize it really at all), so they only sold 144K of them. I bought it as a gaming tablet for my wife, including LTE, but then discovered it was better than my Google Nexus 9 LTE, and US$230 cheaper -- again with LTE, let alone a MicroSD slot.
So now the nVidia Shield 2 is known as the Google Pixel C tablet ... with a $300 mark-up. Google didn't design squat in it.
Huawei rubber-necked on that several times, and then just yanked their design for the Google Pixel phone, and named it the Mate 9. Over 3 years of Google promising Verizon's CDMA access, and then they turned around and told Huawei to 'get on board,' like nVidia. Again, I don't blame them.
The only reason the US$599 Mate 9 made it to the US is because Huawei wanted to take a "pot-shot" at Google since, again, the Mate 9 was the original Pixel phone -- and not the HTC Ceberes that it is now (suprrise, Google never designs hardware -- right down to the Find/Replace in the Android tree!). I heard it happened literally overnight, with Silicon Valley waking up to a chilly January morning, being told Huawei had cut off all access, and their lawyers had sent letters to prevent them doing anything with the IP any further.
The Mate 9 picked up some 'business user' mindshare, which is why Huawei never dropped the price at all (was still US$599, maybe US$590 at best), unlike the Honor 8 or the Honor 5X/6X for that matter. But that's going to be the end of Huawei-Honor products at the high-end for us Americans for some time.
So it was sad to hear Huawei-Honor confirm they have no plans for either the Honor 8 Pro or Honor 9 coming to the US, despite them getting various US FCC certification on several handsets, including the US equivalents for those models.
I mean, I love my mid-range 5.2" Honor 8 (again, the 5.15" Honor 9 won't be coming for the same reasons as the Honor 8 Pro), and I'm glad I have a backup, since they were only US$289-299 (and the US$299 purchase came with a lot of extras). But my wife never wanted it since it was smaller.
I bought the Ascend Mate 2 in 2014, not wanting a Huawei, but finally caving in on battery life ... plus Google's 'script kiddies' were causing me to have to factory reset every significant update. Being 100% travel from 2004-2016 caused me to care about battery life. The only time I have battery issues is when Google updates some core component. But thanx to EMUI with its power and network firewalls, I can stomp all over Google's stuff.
That's why carriers and Google hate it. It's why I've always tried to go with a non-carrier phone, something that lets me control who's getting what, using my power and network, etc...
I gave my colleagues at Google an earful by 2014, to the point 3 no longer talk to me -- especially when I gave them the ADB information that showcased where they f'd up. I had that recently with the GMail app, and switched to TypeApp, while reconsidering my 'G-Suite Subscription.' To this day I have trashed all of the Android developers for all the issues I've had with the six (6) Nexus devices I've owned, and none of them have had a retort when staring right at the facts.
Every time they made some excuse, I showcased how my nVidia Tablet got the same update 2 weeks later, and had 0 issues, then turned around and showed them the ADB where the problem was. Totally do not know how to sustain software and do basic and I mean basic regression testing ... case-in-point, GMail app issues that hit regularly.
The only issues people in the US ever have with Huawei customer service is when they either ...
A) bought a non-US, non-warranted Huawei (which, like any 'distributor' phone -- regardless of brand -- probably has adware even spyware), or ...
B) bought a Google Nexus 6P, and Huawei knows it's Google's 'script kiddies' that f' that 'bitty on the software end, not hardware -- I know, Asus, HTC and LG Google Nexus devices requiring 'factory resets' personally
It's direct from Huawei, US warrantied phones that don't have issues. I honestly want to 'buy American,' but Huawei is China's IBM, and they are now designing their own, entire platform. Hard to argue with the very, very reference ARM+Mali implementation, especially now that they've released all the source code and the XDA developers will be sustaining. An actual ODM -- the actual device manufacture -- unlocking the boot and wanting people to sustain their platforms for the long term.
I mean, my Honor 8 has enough power to it to last me until 2020. MicroSD with 256GB already in, 4GiB RAM, and the Kirin 950 might not have a killer GPU (the 960 is another story), but the integer and floating point definitely edge out what both the Pixel and iPhone 7 have. That's because Huawei is always first to the market with the latest ARM.
2 year warranty, guaranteed 2 years of updates (2.5+ has been their MO, such as with the Ascend Mate), and I've yet to factory reset after 6 devices between my wife and I. Google's track record is piss-poor in comparison, even Apple's mistakes, although Apple sustains iOS for longer than Huawei will on its devices (which factors in Apple's favor).
So Huawei-Honor seems patient enough to keep selling at the low-end to US Millennials, the ones that cannot get a contract or have other funding issues. Again, I cannot blame them.
So this was basically the last and only 'hurrah' purchase, at significant savings, in the US for a Huawei-Honor phone, since the pipeline is now dry ... at least until the phone is really behind by next year.
