I saw this 1TB hard drive advertised today for $279.99 which made me a bit jealous of my friends in the U.S. They can pick one of these up at any time… but they won’t know what real ramen is like… booya! If you’re in the United States right now you should check this out.
BestBuy has the Hitachi 1TB DeskStar SATA Hard Drive with 32MB cache, retail box, $279.99, and free shipping. Nice. Here’s the link.
Yes…prices like these and easy access via online stores are things that dispel the myth that Japan is some kind of high tech paradise.
The major big box shops (Bic, Yodobashi, etc) rarely have real sales, and the only two things I’ve ever found Akihabara shops cheaper for are flash memory drives, RAM and flash memory cards.
Jason – I thought things would be either cheaper, or there would be more variety. On a side note I think it’s strange that you can get a home theater system, washer-dryer combo, bicycles, and alcohol all from Bic Camera.
Steve, yes, I guess as peripherals, maybe there is more variety, but the brands are not better than Logitech, Lacie, etc. I bought a Buffalo (Japanese) brand external hard drive for much cheaper than a Lacie drive. It died about a year later. I’m not saying some brands never fail, but that was enough for me to start paying the extra money for Lacie external drives.
That said, I used Transcend brand flash media for my cameras and Transcend brand memory in my Macs, and it works great.
In light of sales at big box Japanese electronics stores, they have the “point card” system, where you get anywhere from 5 to 15% “points” that you can use on another purchase. This is good if you want to buy something else right away, but in reality I’d rather just have an off the top discount of 5 to 15% and keep the cash to use as I want.
Yes, Bic has basically the whole gamut of non-food, non-clothes products. I haven’t seen alcohol for sale there though.