The Sinclair QL Forum

RWAP wrote:Ah but there's the problem - if I could buy 20 Trump Cards I would not pay £90 each - I would pay less and sell them for less....

The prices are set not only by the size of the market, but by the size of the supply!

As it is I have customers who have been asking me for disk interfaces for the past 3 years and can't supply them - often pointing them to ones on ebay if they are listed.

This is where we will never see eye to eye.

No, I don't suppose we will.
Like you said, there is a limited interest for *anything* QL.
So, someone wants a Gold Card, sees it on eBay, buys it. Another one comes along, another one buys it. All is well. Eventually, everyone who needs a Gold Card (or a Trump or a SuperGold) will get one.
I have a Gold. Do I want another? No. Do I want a Trump? No. So now the road is open for other people to get one.
If, however, you get them all for any price, say... £75... and sell them for £165... then nobody has a chance to get one but from you and you alone.
I don't think you "point" anyone to eBay. It's more likely that you buy the one from eBay and then resell it to the interested party at double price.
That's greedy and unethical.

RWAP wrote:You bemoan about profiteering on some items, but forget that it is those profits which are used to invest in new projects - where do you think the money for new projects comes from otherwise?

What new projects, mate? You yourself said that nobody's designing new hardware! It's all going in your pocket! And if anyone ever designs anything...

RWAP wrote:I am willing to buy 100 QL-SD Card Interfaces fully tested and working for £35 and sell them for £50.

...you'll end up making more profit! 30% pure profit, actually, from the price you just quoted.
So... what investment?

Software, you say? Couldn't care less about software. Get the profits from selling software and invest it in software. Why would hardware have to be damn expensive, so that some few people will write programmes -- IF they do that?
Websites? Again, don't care. You can't see the QL hardware as the cow that will bring in all the money, because you're bleeding it dry. If it's not bled dry already.

Which is what I said previously: the QL ecosystem needs people who'll design stuff for little or for free. It needs HOBBYISTS, not people that want to make a living out of it. Like DivIDE is free for anyone who can construct it, and the cost is £30-50 from various makers. No, it's not the size of the market. It's the fact that these chaps are ok making £5 per board they sell. If they wanted £25 profit per board, the whole thing would be as dead as the QL "community".

About the 1772, you or anyone else can contact the guy and ask where he gets his controllers. Don't think it's a secret.

RWAP wrote:...most modified QLs do not sell (or at least not for more than £25-£35).

Most modified QLs I've seen are such lousy hack-jobs, even I wouldn't pay more. It's like those people who did the mods were blacksmiths or carpenters or something (no offense to the people who are). Most are housed in really shitty cases, with screws protruding from all over, the boards inside are held by bent metal strips or even blocks of wood (!!!), the power supply is usually thrown in naked, and I've even seen one where the bloody vandal owner used a saw (!!!!) and cut the microdrive section of the original QL case and stuck it in the enclosure's front!!!!!!
I mean, in God's name, don't you (the wannabe modder) have ANY brains left???

Skagon, you do have many valid points but please cut the crap and the attitude or your stay on here will sadly be a short one.

You do see some very funny old bodged up modded QLs but you have to remember that they were done 20 odd years ago and usually by older users Someone on here bought a right corker that had a weird box on it and was painted light blue.

Would you be so kind as to give me an example of "the crap" and "the attitude", kind sir?
I was not aware I had any particular attitude nor wrote crap.
Perhaps you can enlighten me.

By all means talk pricing about parts but once again you are get very specific with your comments and accusations. While it is hard to judge the manner of posting from text alone, a lot of your posts are coming across as argumentative and looking for a bite.

I've already said to draw a line under it once.

skagon wrote: If, however, you get them all for any price, say... £75... and sell them for £165... then nobody has a chance to get one but from you and you alone.
I don't think you "point" anyone to eBay. It's more likely that you buy the one from eBay and then resell it to the interested party at double price.
That's greedy and unethical.

I take offence at the suggestion of me being greedy and unethical - I am sure there are loads of ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum and QL owners who can cite where I do point them at ebay - have a look at my feedback on ebay - there are VERY few items I ever buy on there!

So before you throw any such accusations and start slander on here, do your research!

skagon wrote:What new projects, mate? You yourself said that nobody's designing new hardware! It's all going in your pocket! And if anyone ever designs anything...

RWAP wrote:I am willing to buy 100 QL-SD Card Interfaces fully tested and working for £35 and sell them for £50.

...you'll end up making more profit! 30% pure profit, actually, from the price you just quoted.
So... what investment?

What new projects? At the moment, nothing for the QL other then more keyboard membranes (but that is because no-one has come forward with any proposals)... But what about the ZXpand, the ZXpand-AY, Spectrum faceplates, the DivIDE Plus, keyboard membranes for the Z88, the Spectrums, the Amigas, the CPC664, the ZX80, ZX81, the money I spend on second hand QL software so that I can preserve it and add details to the QL Wiki - or do you think that all comes into being magically...

Would I make 30% pure profit on sales of the QL-SD Interface hmmm - there would be a lot of marketing required, paypal fees, any ebay fees, website hosting fees.... plus the fact that in reality the maximum I'd sell would be 60-70 = 60 x £50 = £3000. 100 x £35 to buy them = £3500

If I sold more then great... but that is where the price has to reflect the risk....

If you were on Dragons Den selling an idea with a 30% gross profit margin (before any marketing or wages), they would laugh at you and tell you 'it's a lifestyle business' - most retailers run on a 100% markup as a minimum.

If you want to design them for £35 and sell them one at a time for £40 that's up to you....

skagon wrote: Software, you say? Couldn't care less about software. Get the profits from selling software and invest it in software. Why would hardware have to be damn expensive, so that some few people will write programmes -- IF they do that?
Websites? Again, don't care. You can't see the QL hardware as the cow that will bring in all the money, because you're bleeding it dry. If it's not bled dry already.

But without new hardware and new software the QL market will stay where it is... You are crazy to think that people will just buy new hardware without any new software (or vice versa).

This discussion is just going round and round in circles because you don't bother to do any research - you have no idea of what running a business is about or what I have done over the years.... You haven't even done any reasearch such as simply checking my ebay feedback on what items I have purchased over the past 11 years... (just 294 items in total!)

skagon wrote: Which is what I said previously: the QL ecosystem needs people who'll design stuff for little or for free. It needs HOBBYISTS, not people that want to make a living out of it. Like DivIDE is free for anyone who can construct it, and the cost is £30-50 from various makers. No, it's not the size of the market. It's the fact that these chaps are ok making £5 per board they sell. If they wanted £25 profit per board, the whole thing would be as dead as the QL "community".

Maybe but where are they crawling out of the woodwork to provide this - more's the pity.

It is hard to compare the Spectrum market with the QL - actually you will find that the costs of making the standard DivIDE is around £15-£20 as it uses a lot of stock parts and is based on a purely public domain design - plus all of the protyping has been done paid for years ago. Several people can write the firmware (drivers) and in fact much of it has been converted from earlier commercial projects (such as the Russian clones!).

To say the size of the market has no impact is naive to say the least - as the sellers will happily order enough parts for 100-200 units at a time, knowing that they will sell them all, thus they can get discounts on the chips and postage costs for buying in the parts. Soldering also does not take a lot of time for the standard DivIDE, as the chips are all quite large pitch - compare that with a CPLD, such as used on the Spectranet.

Take keyboard membranes for example - I know that I can order 750 rubber key membranes at a time and sell them in about 12 months, whereas for the QL, if I bought that many they would be disintegrating by the time I reached the last 200... So I have to order less and so the price per unit is higher than it would be....

vanpeebles wrote:You do see some very funny old bodged up modded QLs but you have to remember that they were done 20 odd years ago and usually by older users Someone on here bought a right corker that had a weird box on it and was painted light blue.

There are some crazily modded QLs - in some cases, it was done just to prove what could be done...

The reason cases were sawn off was mainly to mount the microdrives somewhere accessible in a PC tower case - much of the QL software needed a key cartridge to load, so even with the latest disk interface and floppy disk drives, you still needed access to microdrive cartridges...

I remember my first QL in a tower was just like that - I later switched to an Aurora based QL with a Super Gold Card, but missed having access to the microdrive cartridges and despite having bypassed the copy protection on a lot of software, still had to revert to an original black QL to use some of it...

Could someone point the way to the ringside time-out bell please

<dives under the table, as he "ducks and covers">
_____
.Mark.

vanpeebles wrote:By all means talk pricing about parts but once again you are get very specific with your comments and accusations. While it is hard to judge the manner of posting from text alone, a lot of your posts are coming across as argumentative and looking for a bite.

I've already said to draw a line under it once.

Actually, I think it's the other way around. I seriously don't know if RWAP is the owner of this place or what, but I know that I am right in what I say and I think I've proven my point and made a few irrefutable arguments (and refuted quite a lot too).
It is not my fault that, even on this thread's first post I pointed out that this has nothing to do with the previous discussion, but he keeps bringing it back up.

I am sorry if you or he or anyone else doesn't like it. I care about the QL community, not the profits of anyone, nor the supposed "investments" (which, as I said before, only serve to sustain *some* customer base and are not charity).

So, you want me to shut up and pretend all is fine and dandy when **someone** offers overpriced stuff he only **just** bought from another auction at half the price? Or when everyone goes "oh goody... too bad it's too expensive for us", am I supposed to do the same?

I personally think that **someone** had to say all that, and come out and name the names. Might as well be me, even if that gets me banned. I will not let the last word visible be propaganda, for as long as I can and you let me.

No future but what we make...