Love how Apple up-sells storage in hundred dollar increments. I just bought a 32GB SD card (class 10) for my camera for $50 and I'm not buying millions of them at a time.
If you want to participate in a market where things are priced according to what they cost the vendor, look into gypsum. In tech companies, cost-based pricing is good mostly for getting you fired from your Product Manager role.
Tech products are priced according to the market. For many products, Apple competes aggressively on price. What that means is that within the product line, Apple wants there to be a SKU with the best pricing among its substitutes. It may also mean that every product in the line "wants" a price that is competitive according to its specs. But neither of those pricing goals means Apple will price anything according to the cost of components.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in complex markets one of the most important jobs marketing has is to segment the market, which means finding product attributes that command different price points to maximize profit for the company. It may be the case that, regardless of what it costs Apple to add storage to the iPad, the most common kind of customer that wants a large-storage iPad isn't very price sensitive.
This works in both directions. You can play the segmentation game in exactly the opposite direction in enterprise sales: release your product as open source, but sell a supported site-licensed edition. In virtually all Fortune 1000 companies, it is next-to-impossible to embark on any new IT initiative without an accompanying purchase order; the whole of what IT does is structured around selecting, procuring, and maintaining products.
Not all flash is the same. SD cards and USB sticks use cheap, slow, high-density flash manufactured with older processes. The A4/A5 flash is also integrated into the same package as the CPU(s). Most analysts estimate the flash as a significant part of the overall cost of iOS devices. Yes, it is market segmentation as well, but that extra flash still isn't free.
> The A4/A5 flash is also integrated into the same package as the CPU(s)
Really? That would be by far the most aggressive die stacking I've ever heard of, if true. I thought it was soldered to the motherboard in stacks of 2-4 dice.
See step 16 of iFixit's iPad teardown. Looks like both ram and flash are separate assemblies. Only the iPhone has the ram integrated with the CPU package.
To support my original point, though, iSuppli's breakdown of the iPhone 4 last summer had the 16 GB flash chip as the second-most expensive component, after the retina display, at ~15% of the total outlay on parts.
For "power users", the Xoom should be a clear winner, no? More free customization, tabbed browsing (and plenty of RAM to handle it nicely), and most importantly, it is free to develop for the Xoom from any OS.
As far as cheaper, maybe the Nook Color would be a smarter buy for the "penny-pincher".
Or, with the actual pricing compared to the competition, think of it this way:
The price model is competitive enough for the price to sink in hundred dollar decrements, although a 32GB flash memory chip is only $50. Maybe that's something you only can do if you expect to sell millions of them?
The rip off level pricing on storage and the obvious, purposeful omission of a card slot is one thing that really turns me off from buying an iPad or iPhone.
From the article:
" Yes, we can all agree that the displays are seriously cruddy and the overall build quality and design, for lack of a better work, suck, but at this point we've just come to expect that for a tablet under $300. "
"Yes, we can all agree that the displays are seriously cruddy and the overall build quality and design, for lack of a better work, suck, but at this point we've just come to expect that for a tablet under $300."
That looks like trash compared to the iPad. We've seen in the market so far that building a tablet that is remotely close to iPad in terms of hardware build, let alone software, costs more.
Not 'weird'. That is unrelated and dependent upon other factors.
I'm not referring solely to the iPad. Apple charges an extra $100 for 16GB of flash storage for iPhones and iPods. That's not market rate.
The whole idea of pricing storage like that came from the iPod, and I think by the time you have devices that are used for general computing like iPads, it's time to drop it. I would prefer to have a card slot.
(By the way, for people who may be downvoting my earlier comment because they think I'm some crazed anti-Apple partisan, I do own a MacBook Pro and an iPod. A client is also buying me an iPad 2 for completing a project, so... that's just my opinion about the storage pricing).
I am not sure whether I would want one. Having one would introduce a lot of opportunities, but also would remove lots of ease of use. Install an app => user must select where to install it. User interface-wise, what would happen to the home screen if I take out a card with some applications on it? What if I plug in another card? What if that card contains an application that already is on the built-in flash? Will this support separating executable from user settings? Etc.
The best solution for this I know of is the one Microsoft chose for their phones: no built-in flash, and the card slot is in a place where it cannot be removed without shutting down the hardware. However, I am not sure that solution adds sufficient value to the device to warrant its downsides (some compartment door that makes the device slightly larger, and that likely makes the device look a little bit less nice)
I have a palm pilot that used an SD slot and I thought they handled that very well. When you installed an app it installed to main memory. You could move it to the SD if you wanted to. And when you ejected the sd, the icons for the apps that were on the SD card on the home screen disappeared. They came back when you put the card back in.
I'm not saying I want that back, but I am saying that I thought it was a pretty nice easy way of making that work.
