Ewan from SMS Text News received word recently about 3’s recent price drop for the contact-free dongles, which are now £49.99 – a whopping fifty squid off the original cost. I’m no mathematician, but that sure sounds like a reduction of 50%, otherwise known as half-price. In fact, if you’re the type of person who has lots of money to throw around in a grotesque “call this a recession!?” manner, you can now buy two for the original price point – keeping one and giving one to your Nan, simply for the resulting technophobic thrills.

I can’t really emphasise enough how highly Ewan perceives this price drop, referring to it as “brilliant, brilliant pricing” and predicting that the shiny, white PAYG USB modems will be flying off the shelves. He also offers a brief appraisal of 3’s competitors in the space, who he believes have been caught napping. And, if his anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, this is particularly true for lucky owners of this year’s thinnest, must-have item the Macbook Air.

It seems as though Vodafone’s USB modem does not come preloaded with Mac drivers, meaning Ewan had to use the 3 Mobile Connect software that came with his trial 3 dongle (loaded with both Mac and PC drivers) to configure the Vodafone stick and get it working. Nightmare.

Until very recently, this is one of those situations which I could happily ignore. After having switched to a Mac in the past few weeks however, I can feel my indignation rise – which is, coincidentally, negatively correlating with the PAYG dongle’s price.

Nice.