Nov 062005
Face it, ipods are considered cool. They are hyped and way to expensive for what they offer IMHO. Up to now, people who heard this could easily flame the person who issued this statement-but thanks to Evan Light, we now know more about the cost Apple pays for manufacturing an ipod 30GB.
He links to an article by a hardware analyst in his excellent blog:
http://gadgetfetish.blogspot.com/2005/10/dr-jobslove-or-how-cuppertino-company.html
If you follow over to his web site, you will see that the ipod mentioned above costs Apple about 144$ to produce, leaving a nice 50% margin. Then add in the revenue made in the iTunes music store.
I beleive that it now is fairly obvious that ipods are overpriced-what do you think?
Related posts:
Content, RSS
Twitter
yes I agree Ipods are expensive, but their is no other mp3 player like the ipod. Do you see clickwheels on other mp3 players? easy to use interface? ability to watch movies in H.624 at 30FPS in 320*240? try to watch H.624 on a power pc G3! also you get the good quality nice design. and a warrenty.
remember a 4gb lifedrive is $200 more than a 30gb ipod.
And I dought it costs 0ver $250 to make a lifedrive.
It’s rather naive to just compare the production cost with the list price and then say that an item is overpriced…! Or stating that the item must be overpriced just because the company manages to make an extremely good margin…!? There’s nothing wrong with that! The value of such a product is not just simply the sum of it’s parts and the cost of producing it…!
I agree with MILE – I think the argument that an iPod is overpriced because it’s markup is 50% is silly. Pricing is not a simple “cost+markup” equation with a fixed calculation in the markup field. Sometimes a price needs to be set higher because of customer expectations. There are scores of stories of people not buying things because the price was so low they thought it was too cheap and probably not worthwhile, and how sales increased when the price went up.
Competing on price is also a quick path to nowhere. If your market goes to commodity and price is the only differentiator then you need to get into a new market. There will always be a person/company who can at least meet (if not beat) your price, so you’re in a no-win scenario.
the value of an ipod gets lower and lower each year because they always come out with new products……..