Tesla's cheaper electric car and Apple's cheaper iPhone have grabbed the spotlight over the past couple of weeks, as some alarming trends for the technology industry have been quietly playing out. 
The tech initial public offering market in the world's biggest economy is, for want of a better phrase ... constipated.  In the first quarter of 2016, the number of technology IPOs in the US was ... zero. Zilch. Nil.  
It's the first time that has happened since   March 2009, when the global financial crisis hit its nadir.  
Perhaps the chilly winter for tech IPOs in the United States isn't terribly surprising. The sharemarket performance of the highest ones from 2015 hasn't been great. 
Shares in Etsy, the handmade and vintage goods online marketplace, for example, are down 45 per cent since its IPO. Wearable device maker Fitbit is about 25 per cent below its IPO price and cloud storage company Box is 12 per cent below its IPO price. 
One notable exception is Sydney-based Atlassian, which is up 12 per cent since its IPO, which continues to look well-timed. 
That might be one of the reasons why the picture is very different on the Australian market. 
  Australia powers on  
The ASX is preparing for one of its biggest technology listings ever, with logistics software company WiseTech Global planning to raise upwards of $200 million, in a deal that could value it at more than $1 billion.
There's at least one other sizeable and interesting technology IPO in the works, Redbubble, which is seeking to raise $50 million.
This deal takes on added significance since Redbubble operates an online design marketplace - an area where Australian start-ups are flourishing - and it is a product of the local venture capital system, which has raised a lot of money itself lately and is in need of a hit. 
So what's going on here? For one thing, it was a volatile quarter for global equity markets. Shares sank to their lowest levels in two years, but, in the US at least, are now right back near record highs.
Also, there have been signs of trouble among "unicorns", with the likes of blood diagnostics company Theranos and HR software company Zenefits suffering from high profile scandals. 
And start-ups in the US are just staying private for much longer than they used to.
There's lots of money available from venture capital firms, which are finding it pretty easy to raise money themselves from LPs (institutions such as pension funds and college endowment funds) that need to generate returns in a low interest rate world. 
  Bad habits in private  
As many critics, such as the VC Fred Wilson, have observed, this preference for staying private longer is leading to bad habits and poor discipline among mature start-ups, that subsequently find the public markets hard to adjust to.  
VCs have actually been sitting on the sidelines a bit lately themselves, but they won't be able to for much longer.
As Stewart Butterfield, the chief executive of Slack, which just raised a fresh $US200 million ($262 million) itself last week, explained to me, VC's have their own backers keen to hear how their dollars are being used. 
"If everything is really chaotic and they [VCs] don't know what's going on they can wait out six months or something," he said. "But if you raised $US1 billion in 2015, you have to invest it because first of all, you don't earn management fees, and second of all, your career is over, because you can't just take money from people and not invest it."
So there is a lot of money still to be put to work by VCs, but if the VCs then can't make returns on their money as the start-ups they invest in don't exit through an IPO ... then something has got to give.
That the cycle in the US might have turned is a worry because what happens there tends to play out down here. 
The upshot is all it would take is one successful IPO from a major unicorn to kill this poor sentiment completely. Over to you, Uber/Airbnb/Pinterest.