Lets get a little pool going....

It seems whenever carplayer.com sells an empeg or two, the prices go up. How much do you think the last 10 gig empeg will cost........

The warranties on their players start ticking down from the end of this month, so they only have a couple of weeks left to sell them. That would seem to rule out making the price too outrageous.

Rob

JESUS?!! The 10 gig player just jumped from $379 to $499!?!

I'm less than impressed. Sorry folks, I won't make that mistake again.

Rob

All 10, 20 and 30GB are sold. Only 4 40GB left at $799.99.

their warranties are almost expired? When do they run out?
(I picked up one from carplayer about a month and a half ago)

crap, i'm going to order a new hd for this thing if it's almost out of warranty. Who makes good 2.5" ide hd's these days?

their warranties are almost expired? When do they run out?

One year from the date of purchase (as far as I know...).

I don't think Rob meant that their warranties will run out. I think he meant that their deal with carplayer.com put a statute of limitations on how long they could offer them for sale with a factory warranty.

Who makes good 2.5" ide hd's these days?

I urge you to buy IBM Travelstar drives if you plan on upgrading. They seem to be the most tolerant of extreme temps.

I'll toss in another vote for IBM and add Toshiba to the mix. I've got mainly 30G Toshiba drives in my players and have had no issues of drives not working together or not spinning up. Though I mainly take the empeg inside with me as well as use an interior heater in the car during the winter, there's been a number of times where the player was left in the car in sub zero (centigrades, < 32F) temperatures - no problems.

The Fujitsus seems to be the ones most affected by cold weather.

/Michael

I am not about to go back and forth on a messageboard with angry people, but I thought I would give a small explanation of how things worked on carplayer.com's end for those who may be interested. For those not interested, please skip over this post.

The units were purchased for just over $200 USD, shipping had to be paid from the UK to the US on all the units, then customs and taxes on all the units, then delivery charges to the carplayer office.

After all that was done, orders started being filled, requiring quite a bit of labor. About 98% of orders shipped right away and a LOT less complaints were seen on the board regarding these units vs. the e-store which would fill orders weeks after they were placed, or not at all.

A message was posted giving special prices to everyone on the board, $289 I believe. 75% of the units were sold at or around this price, half of them international with shipping of $38. If anyone would like to check with UPS, you can see that the shipping fee is a LOT more than $38 for UPS Express.

What does all this boil down to? Half the units being sold at or below cost. Why? Because of the very limited time to sell the units before the warranty ticked down, and the huge risk of having hundreds of anything in stock, as you never know what can happen, a big risk.

Once a lot of units were sold, we started making our profit on the last 100 units. It was posted numerous times to the board that prices would be going up (as we must make a profit).

You know something?

Apart from an introductional offer to this board (which I really thought was a nice idea), almost every seller I know of would have used just the opposite strategy from yours: Start out at a high price (at least after the eStore went out of stock) and reduce price slightly after a while, and more and more the nearer the end of warranty timeline came. This would be more logical: You get more desperate to sell the rest of your stock when the clock ticks down, and demand probably doesn't increase much over time (if at all), so there is a (comparatively) huge supply and a small demand near the end of this month. Using the most basic marketing/selling rule of price=demand/supply*constant, price should go down now.
But anyhow: I deprecate your decision of raising the prices again, but it is still your decision, and I can do nothing about it (except explaining my own reasoning to you).
Good luck selling the rest of your units.

cu,
sven

You know something?

Apart from an introductional offer to this board (which I really thought was a nice idea), almost every seller I know of would have used just the opposite strategy from yours: Start out at a high price (at least after the eStore went out of stock) and reduce price slightly after a while, and more and more the nearer the end of warranty timeline came. This would be more logical: You get more desperate to sell the rest of your stock when the clock ticks down, and demand probably doesn't increase much over time (if at all), so there is a (comparatively) huge supply and a small demand near the end of this month. Using the most basic marketing/selling rule of price=demand/supply*constant, price should go down now.
But anyhow: I deprecate your decision of raising the prices again, but it is still your decision, and I can do nothing about it (except explaining my own reasoning to you).
Good luck selling the rest of your units.

cu,
sven

That is the strategy that is usually used, in the EMPEG's case there was an active community who wanted to purchase players at reasonable prices, with fears that stock would be low. Players were provided at low prices to those who knew they wanted them and those that followed in their footsteps paid more. This approach seemed best for a product that's being sold to a "community" rather than having the most dedicated enthusiastic people pay the MOST only to have people who were half and half on the idea pay half...... I guess it all depends how you look at it, regardless, they could not ALL be sold at cost.

In reply to:

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I urge you to buy IBM Travelstar drives if you plan on upgrading. They seem to be the most tolerant of extreme temps.

---

The older Travelstars I bought all work beautifully, but the one in my current Latitude (well, it's my employers' current Latitude) has a temperature-influenced "knocking" problem, namely, once it gets "too hot" (and I can't quantify that since I didn't realize what the problem was until it was "too late") it starts thermal recalibrating *a lot*. I ran Dell diagnostics and the drive checked out fine, except the disk read test too forever, because every time it "knocked", there was a delay reading. Dell of course says there's no problem.

A quick search of Google will turn up other people with the problem, and a friend with a slightly newer Inspiron seems to suffer sporadically from it as well. This thread on Google Groups covers it. This guy has the same laptop I do. Some confusion (look at the end of his post) with other issues seems to mask this, however, when you have it you'll know it. Eventually the drive gets so unhappy that it spins down entirely.