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Comment by RegnisGnaw | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think the "the difference in demand alone can't explain this gap"?

I imagine there's little demand for 3.5in drives but they're readily available. Maybe the difference in demand is more than I assume it to be.

I suspect the difference in demand is huge. I still have stacks of 3.5" disks sitting around the house. I haven't had a 5.25" inch disk sitting around since the early 90s.

I'm about the same here. I should really order a USB 3.5" drive to get the last data off them this year.

I got one about a decade ago as a just in case... it's in my garage somewhere, still in the box.

Doesn't the magnetic data on the disks fade over that time scale?

Dunno... I don't actually have any 3.5" media... but got one because back then, I was more inclined to help people with things.

Perhaps the missing piece of information is that: nobody makes any of these drives any more. The 3.5 drives sold are either old stock or refurbished. Heck I bought my last one (to make bootable floppy images for some patent litigation project) probably 10 years ago and that one was a refurb.

Or _not_ refurbished, according to what I recall reading on some vintage-computer discussion — the typical Amazon-grade USB floppy drives contain scrap pulls that may or may not still work.

In school I was thought: with lower demands, come lower prices

Somebody failed to communicate you the big picture.

Usually, prices are higher if the demand is consistently lower. But that's not a certainty.

Anyway, production and consumption are in (near) equilibrium, and the price is the communication channel that brings that (near) equilibrium. That doesn't imply in any price level, it's only a communication channel, where both sides input their preferences and settle on some value. The actual value depends on what are both sides preferences.

Lower demand would be a shift from D2 back to D1 on this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand#/media/File:...

But if the demand curve shifts leftwards or downwards enough, it won't intersect with the supply curve at all. At that point, the model says commerce halts because there's no price that both sellers and buyers are willing to trade at.

You left out a part:

For commodity goods, lowering the demand will lower the price towards the marginal cost of production.

A commodity good is interchangeable: you don't care whether you buy a bushel of winter wheat from Farmer A or Farmer B. A commodity good is produced by many entities and desired by many entities.

Some goods are not commodities but are substitutable: when AMD made pin-compatible 386 and 486 processors, you didn't care much about whether a 40MHz 386 came from Intel or AMD, which is why AMD's lower prices let them build their marketshare substantially.

If a widget isn't being produced at all, just sitting in a warehouse, the price can easily be governed by:

- the person who needs a hundred of them vs the warehouse that would like to no longer pay an inventory tax on the 110 in stock

- the broker who knows where the last hundred widgets are stored, and has figured out customers who really need them in ones and tens

- the warehouse that thinks it has all the remaining widgets in the world, and advertises them at a high price to see if anybody wants them

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