Even for people who call it a big iPod touch; the touch starts at $229. The bigger screen and battery aren't free. $499 is a fair price, even if 16GB of memory is a bit stingy.
Funny to remember before the iPad introduction people were expecting $999.
As one of the commenters points out, you could get a beautiful Macbook Air at that price. If it really is priced at $1199, its not just overpriced, its priced not to sell.
> Update: We've heard rumblings that this is indeed just a price holder -- much like the way other companies price products they don't want to sell at ridiculous levels -- and the final price will indeed be the $800 we've heard most consistently to this point.
Yup. My other comment still applies. Maybe without the laughter at the beginning for $800. At that price (to quite John Gruber) it was doomed. At this price, it's just probably screwed.
Ah, hahahaha. I dare people to keep saying Apple can't compete on price. It's an old saw that hasn't been true for years. I also think it's the primary reason for the dearth of competitors to iPod Touch and the iPad: two massive markets that Apple seems to invented (or at least been first to get right) and managed to keep all to themselves.
The complains are about Apples iMacs and Notebooks, which are still pretty pricey for the hardware thats in there. All the iOS devices are very competitive priced.
I hate to take this bait, but I'm hoping maybe I'll get a recommendation here. This is not rhetorical. I'm not happy with the space I'm using up by having an Ubuntu in a VM on my SSD, so this question is very real, not just some Apple fanboy rant.
I would like to buy a second laptop to run Ubuntu, but I want something with incredible build quality. I'm an Apple user, so clearly I don't mind paying a premium (ta-dum tss).
The closest I've found is Lenovo, but their product still comes in a fully plastic enclosure containing a hundred screws and as many tacked on plastic panels as a Pontiac Aztek. I've read about their "roll cage", and I think that's a pretty cool idea, but it still doesn't hold up to Apple's unibody designs. I owned a T41 back around 2005 (best guestimate), so I'm not speaking entirely from ignorance of the product. I really don't feel it matches my MacBook Pro.
Now, you might say that I'm being unreasonable, but I have the money, and I'm willing to spend it. If anyone has a lead on a well-built laptop with the design simplicity of an Apple MacBook, I'm interested to hear about it.
I'm looking for:
Something in the 13" range. I don't need anything super-powerful (C2D and 2 GB of RAM should be fine). I do care about build quality. The primary use-case is sysadmin duty. I want something small and light to take on the road that still has a bash shell. I want to go Ubuntu, rather than a 13" MBP because I've been very impressed with the work coming out of the Ubuntu community lately, and I don't like to limit my world to Apple alone. All of our VPSs run Debian, which is similar enough to Ubuntu that I can bring over a lot of my dot-files and customizations.
You've checked the specs, haven't you? Ipad with such hardware specs would cost a lot more, in my opinion. It's a question whether ipad2 will be able to match the specs of xoom. For me, hdmi port is a great feature.
There needs to be a great $500 Android tablet with appropriate specs (great battery life, snappiness, appropriate resolution, small, great build quality).
I don’t think that $800 tablets with extravagant specs will help Android corner the tablet market. Specs luckily don’t matter much anymore.
I don't think that Motorola is after the whole market with Xoom. There are plenty of lower priced android tablets. So there's lots of choice for upper and lower end buyers. Also, ipad is priced from $500 to 900$, depending on specs, which means that they do matter.
Well, perhaps we'll see a stripped-down version of xoom later on. Half the memory, no 3g, single-core processor. Could reduce the price for a few hundred bucks.
They don’t want to target the higher end of the market, they want to obsolete the iPad. They shouldn’t be surprised when they get then criticized harshly for not delivering.
When is the market is essentially all high end (everyone wants the iPad to be the computer for the masses, but all surveys show it is a luxury item currently), I don't think targeting that the high end is a bad plan. iPod knockoffs never won despite a lower price, so why not go for good build quality at a high price?
Consumers pay about $600 on average for an iPad. If all iPads were equally popular the average would be more like $665. Apple’s most expensive iPads are not their most popular.
I do believe that only good quality tablets can compete head on with the iPad but I do also think that the price point is important. Apple has shown that it is possible to make a high quality $500 tablet.
But what does this really tell us about the price of iPads? Is Apple selling iPads at prices under the bill of materials, or do they have such a lock on things like NAND flash that nobody else can build a similar product for the same price?
All the talk about screen size and HDMI and ports is noise in the final price. You need to look at what Motorola is paying for things like flash, processor fab, and Gorilla Glass to understand why the price is so high.
Apple saves a lot of money by pre-buying things like flash in massive quantity. It will drop millions all at once to ensure that it gets better prices than anyone else can get from it's suppliers, which helps keep costs low.
It's not just contracts on pricing that Apple is dominating, it's the actual production capacity of the chip makers.
"Digitimes reported Wednesday that Apple recently placed an order of 50 million 8Gb flash chips that it plans to use for that iPhone thing you might have heard about, and therefore the rest of Samsung's customers will have to wait for their chips."
24 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 68.3 ms ] threadSent from my iPad.
Funny to remember before the iPad introduction people were expecting $999.
Only when you compare unlike with like. As soon as you look at similar spec, design and build quality it is a different story.
Like the Dell Adamo "Macbook Air killer":
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20031079-64.html
I would like to buy a second laptop to run Ubuntu, but I want something with incredible build quality. I'm an Apple user, so clearly I don't mind paying a premium (ta-dum tss).
The closest I've found is Lenovo, but their product still comes in a fully plastic enclosure containing a hundred screws and as many tacked on plastic panels as a Pontiac Aztek. I've read about their "roll cage", and I think that's a pretty cool idea, but it still doesn't hold up to Apple's unibody designs. I owned a T41 back around 2005 (best guestimate), so I'm not speaking entirely from ignorance of the product. I really don't feel it matches my MacBook Pro.
Now, you might say that I'm being unreasonable, but I have the money, and I'm willing to spend it. If anyone has a lead on a well-built laptop with the design simplicity of an Apple MacBook, I'm interested to hear about it.
I'm looking for:
Something in the 13" range. I don't need anything super-powerful (C2D and 2 GB of RAM should be fine). I do care about build quality. The primary use-case is sysadmin duty. I want something small and light to take on the road that still has a bash shell. I want to go Ubuntu, rather than a 13" MBP because I've been very impressed with the work coming out of the Ubuntu community lately, and I don't like to limit my world to Apple alone. All of our VPSs run Debian, which is similar enough to Ubuntu that I can bring over a lot of my dot-files and customizations.
I don’t think that $800 tablets with extravagant specs will help Android corner the tablet market. Specs luckily don’t matter much anymore.
Specs obviously still matter when it comes to the price but they don’t matter to consumers. They want a snappy device, that’s all.
EDIT: I've found one bit of news that suggests there'll be a wifi only Xoom: http://androidcommunity.com/motorola-xoom-wifi-clears-fcc-20...
If you have any doubts about Motorola’s intent to compete with Apple head on, here is their Super Bowl commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09vmRWeNZSM
This video from Motorola makes their intent even clearer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vRgesYJHKo
They don’t want to target the higher end of the market, they want to obsolete the iPad. They shouldn’t be surprised when they get then criticized harshly for not delivering.
I do believe that only good quality tablets can compete head on with the iPad but I do also think that the price point is important. Apple has shown that it is possible to make a high quality $500 tablet.
All the talk about screen size and HDMI and ports is noise in the final price. You need to look at what Motorola is paying for things like flash, processor fab, and Gorilla Glass to understand why the price is so high.
"Digitimes reported Wednesday that Apple recently placed an order of 50 million 8Gb flash chips that it plans to use for that iPhone thing you might have heard about, and therefore the rest of Samsung's customers will have to wait for their chips."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9983117-37.html
So if you're scrounging for NAND on the open market, you're gonna get screwed on price. It's not just Moto that's feeling the pressure.