The Netgear switch that I purchased in May 2022 (to run TP-Link Omada: like a mesh network, except that it works (alternative to UniFi), which is still working great) for $180:
I was in a conversation with some friends, one of whom is a UniFi zealot, and wanted to check the power output compared to a feeble UniFi switch. I learned that the exact same Netgear switch was still available from the same retailer in December 2024… for $250:
That’s 39 percent inflation over 2.5 years in our otherwise inflation-free economy.
How’s our four-year-old minivan doing as a collector’s item? KBB emailed a week ago to say that it was still going up in value.
Well, TP-Link equipment is likely to be banned shortly, due to suspicion their equipment has deliberate backdoors for Chinese intelligence (hard as they may be to distinguish from the unintentional backdoors created by sloppy IoT coding practices).
Perhaps the other vendors have preemptively raised prices in anticipation of reduced competition from the market leader?
That said, according to Amazon price-tracking site CamelCamerlCamel, you may just have been lucky with timing in 2022:
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07DNT7JCT
That’s a lot of money for a switch. Of course, the lion kingdom never had a $40 gigabit switch which really got above 100 megabit.