Consumers reluctant to spend above $700 for Apple tablet - study - Page 4

You do realize that this is false information leaked on purpose so that everyone can be up in amrs about how it's going to cost $1000, and then when Apple gives it to us at $600, we'll all say "bless you bless you kind sir!"

Well, that's my theory anyway... we'll find out in a week

and you know what? a far more equal competitor has been doing it for years at a price point below the kindle as well. it's called the Archos 5...$249 for the 8 gig. Pllays 720p movies, has Android OS and the AppLib for apps. Plus it has a DVR function and a Digital TV tuner. Sounds like Apple better have a really compelling product to beat this.
http://www.archos.com/

Sure the new Archos 9 with windows 7 on it is $549, but that's still going to beat the kindle. and archos has been around since 2002. Time tested.

ok, so how is multi-touch going to make typing on forums and writing emails less cumbersome than it already is on the iphone? To me, netbook or physical keyboard wins out on that. Unless it's going to be voice controlled and we all know that's a terrible idea.

i'm drinking that kool-aid too. People around going to be thinking they are getting some kind of deal on 600 bucks when the we all read the break-down material cost and know profit it about 200% to sometimes 400%. Apple has a good track record and they take full advantage of it. It's not like their products are lined with gold or anything they just work well and are quality products and they can charge a premium for it.

Yes...
Actually...in some countries...tethering is not allowed. In Japan for instance, there is a difference between Mobile use and Computer use when using internet. Mobile Use falls in the data plan, whereas computer use does not....

even should be the case, i still think that the applet would not have 3G integrated. Can be extended to use 3G thru some expansion card or as you said thru tethering... but not a 3G card inside. In fact, previous notebook makers tried to sell the 3G enabled notebook...but weren't really succesfull...

I've been using a Kindle version 2 for over a year and I find it hard to replace it with a computer. Why? F

- Weight
- Superior E-Ink
- Battery life
- Books cost

I don't think the tablet will beat the kindle in term of weight. I'm telling you, after 1 or 2 hours reading, even 250 grams feel heavy... I estimate that the tablet will be around 700g at least.

In addition If you have tried E-Ink devices you know what i mean in term of readability. Looking at an E-Ink screen it is really relaxing. I'm really excited about the tablet, but it will not replace my kindle for my books. Colors? after using my kindle, so far, i've never felt the big need for colors when using an ebook.

An LCD screen, even you push power saving as much as you can, cannot last more than 5 hours of continuos use. Just check the ipod touch, if i'm using wifi and half luminosity, it doesn't last 5 hours. bigger screen, bigger battery...but E-ink books out there last 2 weeks and have instant on/off and while showing a page they don't use any power.

Amazon has books for the kindle at a really low price. Apple, we must say, is really greedy in terms of profit from publishers. I don't think books would be cheaper than amazon.

Moreover...any book purchased on amazon, can be read on any PC or iphone... beat that...

I almost forgot. Amazon lost his first round with schools and university when they tried to push the Kindle as a replacement for textbooks. Why? Not really for the black and white thing...but because vision impaired people or blind couldn't really use it. Unless apple really comes out with a way (already patented) to make the screen touch sensitive (i.e. braille on screen)... they will have hard time to enter universities.

... I was suprised by the comment of steve jobs "People is not reading anymore books" during a keynote last year. I think they didn't consider Ebooks until recently... which means, they will provide them but not as a one of the strongest point. a way to say "It can do that too".

Since a 32GB iPhone costs $699 and the lowest end MacBook costs $999, then you are okay paying $850 for it? At $850, you are only $150 from a full-function laptop. If this is your idea of "okay", then Apple has a great value proposition for you.

Now if you meant between the $299 SUBSIDIZED price of an iPhone, then you must also accept that any subsidy on whatever iTablet-y thing Apple introduces will require you to pay a monthly fee to some carrier or perhaps have to deal with constant mobile ads on your device (Apple did by a mobile ad firm, right?)

Somehow, some way, Apple has to make a profit on the device. And given their 30%+ margins, you can assume that it WILL cost more than $700 w/o subsidy just by mere fact that a bigger device with more functionality than the $700 iPhone will carry with it higher cost of manufacturing. And given how well Apple is already doing, and the fact that the tablet market is virtually non-existent, there is no reason to underprice a new device that unnecessarily eats into their margins, UNLESS there is a viable competitive threat in the marketplace (none currently exists) or the need to corner the market with first-mover advantage (very risky when the size and profitability of the market is unproven).

Apple will attempt to create a market that doesn't really exist yet. As a result, pricing, supply, and demand issues are unpredictable. At some point, the market will supposedly decide what is an acceptable price given the value that the device offers. So... we wait.

OK, lets get this straight once and for all. The only consumers with ANY interest in this at present are all of the geeks and nerds that frequent the tech rumour sites. That means us. Yep, all of us, the geeks, the nerds, the moaners, groaners, whingers, elitists, know it alls and general aholes (tekstud a.k.a. mactripper) who make up the 0.001% of those who buy Apple products by their masses (e.g. iPods and iPhones).

So its pretty unlikely that anything we say will make any difference to the price Apple launch at. Plus most of the posters here are just members of the waitandsee brigade anyway.

I'm reluctant to spend above $7 for an unannounced product with a mystery spec and featureset, where I have little to no idea what I'd use it for.

This may change by Wednesday evening.

I have created a forum here for discussion of the islate device http://www.techreviewonlineforum.com...forum-f18.html

Id love you all to bring the convo for the device there too. See you there.

Mark
Techreviewonline.co.uk

Although the 32GB iPhone costs $700 unsubsidised, it's worth noting that the 32GB iPod Touch costs $300 unsubsidised. I can't realistically see a reason the iPhone is $400 more than the iPod Touch - but they are the prices as they exist today.

You also presume a MacBook does more than the slate will.


Yes bigger will cost more. The bigger screen and battery are $50 extra cost. The backing will also cost more. The chip is likely to be faster. They probably have 512MB of ram too.

Given the iPod Touch / iPhone price discrepancies, it's likely Apple has an extra high margin on iPhone and quite a low margin on iPod Touch. Which will they choose for the slate? When they released movie rentals for iTunes they dropped 40% off the price of the AppleTV, without subscriptions being thrown in to guarantee a return.


No reason to underprice the device? Apple needs to make a splash with the device, or it'll die slowly.

If they price it very low, more people will buy it. Apple won't make much money on that of course. But the publishers will be pleased to have more customers buying their magazines, more videos will be rented, newspapers read, accessories made, developers will be more interested... they have to get the numbers to make it start.



This is true. The cost of the device does also determine the price of course... but yes there are many unknowns and it is a gamble for Apple.

I don't know, nor do I pretend to know. Unlike some folks in this discussion, i'm going to wait and see what and how this device does things before I make any judgements about it.

Like I said in another post that you quoted me on.. It is not just "what" something does, it's also "how" it does it. Meaning there is much more to a product than just a feature list. The only reason there is so much hype and buzz about this product is because everyone knows what Apple is capable of.

We are gonna have to wait another week to find out..

For those wanting the full desktop OS X on the tablet, wouldn't that require all current and future OS X apps to be recompiled for ARM?

I very much doubt I would consider it at even 700 dollars. The base Macbook is 1000 dollars now, isn't it? The tablet would near certainly be underpowered, lower capacity, slower, less compatible, and less versatile. I just don't see the point.



More than just recompiled...It took them three years with the aid of Intel to reprogram for x86 when they switched from PowerPC, switching architectures is no walk in the park.

if it is $999 and won't stream videos free from network sites it could fail right there. Add that you have to buy free tv shows without ads of course, a monthly 3g fee and it won't pat other media like divx, when Jobs gets ready to say the price, I would not be surprised if the audience moaned but they won't. If they can afford attending, $999 is not that much. In this economy though, right now it is.

When you've paid $500 for a 40GB iPod a few years back, $700 for the tablet doesn't seem like all that much. Pricing the thing at $999 would be a mistake however. Correct me if I'm wrong, but just look at the MacBook Air. It's overpriced, underpowered, and doesn't have an optical drive. As a result, it didn't enjoy the same success of the MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Lies!

Apple can ask $1200 and I'll still buy it!
Beyond that it needs to be more than just really great.

Amazon has no trouble selling the Kindle DX for $489, the Apple tablet will do much more than the Kindle DX, so asking $999 or more for it seems reasonable to me.

Perhaps...But to me, 999 is 3 netbooks, with more functionality and presumably better specs, or 1 midrange laptop, or a laptop and a netbook, or 999 one dollar hookers...999 just won't do it for me.


For what its worth, the normal, non-DX kindle is 250.

One of the things that we must keep in mind is that as long as there are 138,775* iPhone/iPod touch apps available and only a handful of them have been created for your computer, there is no 'full-functioning' computer.

It would appear that this new Apple device is a new paradigm in communication, i.e., in how we get our information. It won't do what you can do on your current computers, cell phones or PDAs. But what it will do, is open technology is such an intuitive manner that most of the world will more easily understand and appreciate.

Whatever the price will be, people, and a lot of them, will buy it. It won't be for everyone, particularly a lot here who's egos are so struck that they just won't buy an 'Apple'. It won't be a primary tool for the creative or business type to build their lives, but it will be their tool to expand their message.

And no matter how many may pan this new product, expect to see a lot of attempts to fool the naysayers as the copies and me-toos abound. And they too will succeed somewhat.

*http://www.macworld.com/appguide/index.html

Actually... the "non-tech no-geek" crowd will be the biggest consumer of this device. I've said before, "it's not for "us" (geeks and decade-long computer users)... but for "them" (the normal Windows/entertainment users that just can't deal with it's inherent problems)."

This is the device for people that don't want "complicated", to be able to use a computer.

I witnessed this first-hand today with my sister and my 17-month old nephew, and the new iPhone she got for X-mas.

My sister uses the iPhone like I wish I could get here to work with the Mac: fast, easy, and smiling the whole time... rather than consternation and sometimes frustration when not being able to do something as easily as she wishes.

As for my nephew... the same as the little 1-year old on YouTube... playing animal-sound games, viewing pictures, etc... he can't even talk in sentences yet(!), but can use a "computer" to entertain himself.

This device will define a whole new segment of the population... I just don't have a name for that yet. It surely won't be simply "computer-user"... since nobody thinks of the iPhone as a computer either.

BTW: subsidized or not... their WILL BE lines... Very. Long. Lines.

I said nearly two months prior it would be priced around $899 so not to castrate Macbook sales.

I agree with this. Steve wants this device to a paradigm shifter like the iphone. 99% of folks didn't even imagine what we could do with a phone until the iPhone popped up. Steve wants the same thing to happen here. If it is, then the price is almost irrelevant at the start. Relativity to a macbook won't count if it does everything differently in common use cases that the macbook/netbook doesn't satisfy.
I think this is intended to be so entirely different to a laptop that it will set it's own price. For instance, this thing will:
1. sit on a coffee table or end table not a desk (plugged into a dock a lot to keep it juiced).
2. Family members will pick it up as if it were a magazine, to read any content (news/mag/book), view other media (TV show, youtube clip etc.) all while on the sofa, not in the office, at a dining table, in an uncomfortable chair. I know people use laptops on the sofa but it is neither comfortable nor natural to have 5lbs on their lap to do such "trivial" things, which it is not optimized to do.
3. While several people watch the game on the HDTV, someone else will be there but with headphones watching greys anatomy off iTunes or reading some Dan Brown epic or playing Tetris/GTA.
4. Or the slate will go off to the kitchen displaying a recipe in large font propped up in one of the many stand accessories that will proliferate for different uses. To scroll down, you just use a floury finger to move the screen - no gunk in the keyboard...

That is just home/family use. What about all the professional applications like in businesses, schools, hospitals, (patient notes, diagnostic tools, video-con with a consultant in another wing/hospital, etc.) none of which can be done out of hand right now. I can't even think about what the out of home/office (travel) uses might be (needing 3G) but that is a whole other set of cases too.

There will be stands for propping up like a book, like a little TV, to make it easier to hold for long reading, to prop up for limited typing, rubberized cases for water/food/dust resistance, holsters for holding it on your arm as you walk around (e.g. doing hospital rounds), etc.

Most sane people would not use a laptop for many/any of these things, some might use a netbook but those are not optimized for most of those uses and mostly rubbish.

It is likely to be able to do more than this but I would bet that it is not going to be viewed as an equivalent to a laptop but as a completely different and additional device. As the family tablet for a family that already has enough computers everywhere but the living/family room. I currently use my iphone for these uses but it is killing my eyes and giving me RSI from holding the little device for up to hours at a time. A tablet would be great and I would not consider its price vs. a laptop but in what it would do for me.

Of course it has to be insanely great and do all these things and more, but the iPhone/Touch already does much of this but is way too small for prolonged use. I have high hopes for this but expect a high price. Apple could care less if the cheapskates buy one at launch, only that the well heeled do and the cheapskates want one when it gets cheaper...

Oh, and it won't castrate Macbook sales. You won't do any serious productivity work on it, you can't use it for school (except for text books), etc. 2 largely different sets of use cases, many of which are complimentary (Macbook and textbook, Media Library and player, etc.)

If you have to say that more than once to separate people, I think you need to look at your comparison or analogy.

I think the misdirection may be in regards to it being a device with a 10-inch screen. That may be where we're headed but at this time, I don't see going that route as the next logical step.

What is being forgotten is that Apple needs to grow this segment methodically and, for the most part, has done exactly that. Bring out a pricey tablet that winds up not selling well and Apple takes a step back, not one forward. Continue the incremental evolution of the handheld that has brought us to the very capable, successful Touch, and you have a formula for success.

Naturally, the initial reaction to Apple merely updating the Touch with a larger screen, would be disappointment over Apple not taking a dramatic leap. But then tons of the revised Touch with a bigger screen would wind up in people's hands and no doubt resulting in even more satisfied customers. Going this route would make even more sense right now because the economy is not doing so well. Affordability matters at this time and a larger Touch would set the stage for the even bigger handheld, aka the tablet, that rumours have claimed is coming.

I have to admit that the sheer persistence and volume of rumours that Apple is about to unveil a 10-inch tablet makes it seem inevitable that such a device is going to be presented on Jan. 27. But it still strikes me as illogical that Apple would go that route at this time. On the other hand, illogical and electronics manufacturers have not exactly been strangers.

Yes, that is possible. That's why I went on to explain my point more clearly. It doesn't make much sense for me to go back and edit my original post since it has already been quoted.

Only about 500** of which actually do something useful. Another 500 are flashlights.

**Exaggeration, but you get my drift.

No way I'd buy at $1k. At that price point, you're looking at Newton, take 3.


Not if Apple had stayed with Intel architecture by selecting Moorestown instead of ARM architecture.

700 dollars for 3 yrs ownership
$700 = 965 days
$700 to a $1000 dollar machine is less than ONE DOLLAR A DAy

or 1/2 of a starbuck coffee

its the WIFIi charges which will kill us

hurry apple hurry with your server farms


peace

9

Talk about exaggeration and from someone that doesn't own an iPhone, it must be nice to be armchair quarterback.

About half the 120 'flashlights' are rated by users as useful. Most of the other half haven't been reviewed.

For some, they are a god-send. As a owner, I wouldn't leave a flashlight off my iPhone, no matter how I configured it.

As a developer, it is obvious that many developers got their start by building simple apps first and going from there.

Like everyone else, I don't have time to use most of the apps that I have on my iPhone. But I do have certain sets that I load depending on my itinerary. My home set of apps differ from my business collage and when I travel oversees; my US/Canada, Asia or European GPS sets will prevail as needed.

Where exactly did you pull that assumption from? In point of fact, I owned both an iPhone then later an iPod Touch for a while. I sold both when I realized I hardly used them, something I can't say about my Hackintosh netbook.

If you think a "flashlight" app is useful, you're nuts. No offense. But seeing as how it has a range of about one foot, I'd much rather have the 3w Cree flashlight I always keep in my pocket, which has a useful throw of about 50 feet.

Fact is, there may be a ton of apps for the iPhone, but there are a ton of near duplicates, and even developers have admitted that. Wasn't there a well-known developer who said that useful apps in the App Store are getting lost in a sea of fluff apps? And an awful lot of iPhone apps do simple things. Honestly, given the limited storage space, RAM, screen space, processing power and control scheme of iPhones, you will never see anything like a full Photoshop running on them, only some lightweight apps like redeye reduction, auto levels and the like.

I said, "…someone that doesn't own an iPhone…" I guess my assumption was correct. As a matter of fact, it wasn't an assumption unless you lied in an earlier blog.

Now we find you don't even have an iPod touch and your claim of expertise is based on using a hackinstosh netbook. Are you now telling us that you have "a full Photoshop running on it?" BS.

As for a 'flashlight' app, I guess I don't need the power you obviously need to throw light on things. AH.

Let me get this straight. You're saying because I sold my iPhone and iPod Touch after my experiences with them left me wanting, I know nothing about them. Oooookay. I'm done with this silliness.

According to recent posts by this guy, he never ever had an iPhone, he would never buy an iPhone or he sold his iPhone.

By that exaggeration, Android has probably 10 apps worth a crap.

He won't say yes, but I will gladly. You've probably never owned an iPhone maybe an iPod touch, but regardless, if you did and you found yourself "not using it"
then no, you never even owned one.

iPhones are life changing purchases. If you were unaffected, then you didn't use it properly. The iPhone does leave most users wanting. Wanting to use it more and more and more, and hoping for it to get even better with each software release.

The next thing you think of to bring up is hackbook, which is in itself hilarious.

It's a hacknetbook. Which is hilariously ridiculous.

Either quote such a post where I wrote I never owned an iPhone or iPod Touch or STFU. Bolding your entire post doesn't make it any more true.

I haven't been following this closely, but had to jump in anyway.

I don't really agree. I mean - yes iPhones are a paradigm shift in what you can do, and I find it great. But for some people they simply don't care.

The beauty of Apple products is that Apple doesn't try to be all things to all people. They'd rather be an "Oh My God this is amazing" for half the population, than be a "hey that's pretty good" for everyone. The side effect of this is that half the population think it is amazing and can't understand why the other half doesn't. And there is some heated debate over whether a product is wonderful... which we will see in a couple of days!

So 50% of people love it. 25% could take it or leave it. and 25% would really rather something else. But I think that's a great attitude for Apple to take.

Thank you. It's good to see that there are some level minds still in this forum rather than just rabid fanboys who think Steve Jobs is the second coming. "Life-changing purchases." Oh, brother.

Hmm, I guess this wasn't guess work at all, was it.