A few weeks ago in Thailand, there was a flood that did significant damage to factories that manufacture internal hard drives for personal computers all over the world. The extent of this damage was so severe that the factories were forced to shut down effectively stopping the production of these internal hard drives and driving up the prices of the existing ones currently on the market. Asus has reported that the price of their drives have increased anywhere from twenty percent to forty percent depending on the model. Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K3000 three terabyte model debuted in the spring at one hundred and eighty dollars and, because of the flood, the price has risen to three hundred and ninety nine dollars. Similar reports have been reported from other companies for the same reason. Socially, this is obviously bad for the consumer. For those consumers who are into building or modifying their own personal computers, this flood has increased the overall cost of doing so as well as decreased the incentive to do such modifications. Now, for those people who have considered Apple products but have held off because of the lack of ability to customize those machines, this incident may sway them to go with Apple products because the overall ability to customize has taken quite a hit with this flood. For people like me, I am willing to wait for the market to recover (estimated sometime later winter/early spring) because customization is an important factor for me when shopping for a new machine; but for the average user/consumer, this temporary setback could potentially change the whole dynamic of the market in favor of Apple and companies of a similar structure.
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