Tesla's cheaper electric car and Apple's cheaper iPhone grabbed the spotlight in the past couple of weeks while some alarming trends for the technology industry quietly played 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 United States 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 online marketplace Etsy 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. That might be partly why the picture is very different on the Australian market.
The ASX is preparing for one of its biggest technology listings ever. Logistics software company WiseTech Global plans to raise upwards of $200 million, in a deal that could value it at more than $1 billion, and there's at least one other sizeable technology IPO in the works, Redbubble, which is seeking to raise $50 million.
The deal takes on added significance since Redbubble operates an online design marketplace - an area where Australian start-ups are flourishing - and is a product of the local venture capital system, which has raised a lot of money 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 back near record highs. There have been signs of trouble among "unicorns", with the likes of blood diagnostics company Theranos and HR software company Zenefits having high-profile scandals. And start-ups in the US are 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 from Limited Partners that need to generate returns in a low interest-rate world.
As critics such as venture capitalist Fred Wilson have observed, the preference to stay private longer is leading to bad habits and poor discipline among mature start-ups, which then find the public markets hard to adjust to.
VCs have been sitting on the sidelines a bit lately but they won't be able to for much longer. As Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Slack, which just raised a fresh $US200 million ($262 million) last week, explained to me, VCs 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 can't make returns as the start-ups they invest in don't exit through an IPO, 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 here.
All it would take to kill this poor sentiment is one successful IPO from a major unicorn. Over to you, Uber/Airbnb/Pinterest.