“Apple, by and large, likes to float above price wars. When people tell Macbook users that they could get a great Windows laptop for half the price, they just sort of stare at them,” Dave Thier writes for Forbes.
“But Apple is trying to extend its tablet dominance into budget territory with the iPad Mini, and price, suddenly, becomes the vital factor,” Thier writes. “The Nexus 7 retails for $199, and the Kindle Fire as low as $159 — $199 for the HD version. Apple wants to be cheaper, but not that cheap. The iPad mini is arriving at $329. So as we get into a tablet buying kind of mood, the question becomes – is the iPad mini $130 better than its competition?”
MacDailyNews Take: It’s worth more than $130, which makes iPad mini a great deal.
Thier writes, “The iPad mini does have LTE support at a higher price point, which the Nexus and Kindle lack. The app store remains a serious advantage – techies may bemoan the walled garden, but others take comfort in a degree of protection from malware. And the sheer quantity of apps specialized for the iPad can’t be beat.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As always, Apple is correct to let the also-rans deal with the market’s bottom-dwellers. Cheapskates do not make great customers. In fact, skinflints make awful customers; they certainly don’t purchase content and apps like Apple product users do.
Let the undiscerning riffraff wallow in crap as usual.
Related article:
Apple debuts 7.9-inch iPad mini; unveils new 4th gen. iPad with 9.7-inch Retina display – October 23, 2012
Yes. I am afraid it is. When placed next to the Nexus 7, the screen is a total let down. I am totally stunned that Apple would tout this for textbooks and books in general without making a display with superior resolution. Based solely on this, the price is too much.
I am disappointed because I planned on buying two of these for my kids to replace their Kindles and iPod Touches. But we will have to wait for version 2 … maybe.
The readability for books on the iPad2 is not beneficial for long term reading. I read the Steve Jobs biography with it, but had to switch to the Kindle because of eye strain. The Retinal Display was really needed for this to take off with that price in mind.
You know you can change the font you’re reading in ibooks to help you read the books you know.
Just checked the pricing of the iPod touch compared to the iPad mini and ive come to the conclusion that the price of the iPad mini is exactly correct.
iPod touch 32gb : £249
iPad mini 16gb : £269
There’s no way that the iPad mini could be £199 unless Apple reduced the price of the 32gb iPod to £129
If Apple had priced the iPad mini the same price as the iPod touch at £249 that would have cannibalised sales of the iPod touch.
The pricing they have given for the iPad mini is exactly the right price point and wont cannibalise iPod sales.
Apple are very clever indeed.
“But Apple is trying to extend its tablet dominance into budget territory with the iPad Mini”
No, it’s not. It’s trying to break into the “I want a smaller iPad” market, where cost is not the real reason, but rather a smaller, lighter device is the factor driving demand.
…PRICE IS RIGHT?
The mainstream press seem to have made their minds up that US$329 / £269 is way to expensive versus the Android tablets.
It should not have been over $299. I assume Apple’s costs are about $200, just like the Nexus 7. If that’s true, it should have been priced $279, resulting in gross margin of 40%–still very good.
Yes, the iPad mini is too expensive. Period.
I think you mean – Sh*t people who don’t like Apple Fanatics Say.
But if you’re an Apple Fanatic and that’s your opinion of Apple’s pricing, carry on.
Not too expensive (for Apple)
No more expensive than the iPhone 5 is compared with any other smartphone
They only make premium products – so why should this one be any different ? They dont let others use their OS and that one factor puts all the other hardware into the ‘e-reader+’ catagory and not the tablet one. For me its the cellular option that will make this the next killer product.
What does Apple know about pricing. They have only built the most valuable company in the world.
This will make a nice camera and wow that viewfinder – Kids will be making their skateboarding videos like crazy and then edit them on the device itself – they could have sold for $399
re: The MDN take. People wonder why Apple users have a reputation for being elitist and snobby… please don’t perpetuate this garbage.
You’re simply missing MDN’s point.
then the price is right.
apple is often constrained with the numbers they can build. If the can only build X numbers and know that X number want to buy them at 329 then the price is right.
when production catches up then (as usually the case like Macbook Air, original iPhone etc) they can lower the price.
Bottom line is, you get what you pay for, people that buy Apple know what I mean, and the rest, well, the rest will buy cheap crap and wallow in it, then wonder why we make fun of them.
Yes, Sub $300 would be the sweet spot, they’d sell a ton of them.
MDN, I hope I am discerning RiffRaff!
It’s the smart business decision with the long-term in mind. Apple can always adjust the pricing later as time goes by and newer models with better specs are released. These will sell like hot cakes to the hardcore fans and early adopters anyway and Apple gets to retain their margins. It’s better to play from the position of strength that Apple has.
They can always nudge the price down, but NEVER up. Wiggle room.
For me, the price dissuades me from getting it. It’s not that I can’t afford it, but with my MacBook Air 11″ for carrying around – with full OSX capability – any iPad is not really that needed for my purposes. So if the price was nice, I would have gotten it simply because it was at a no-brainer price — but at the current price, no thanks. Also, for sitting on a sofa or lying in bed, I find the 11″ MacBook Air a far more convenient consumption device than the iPad – and there are iPads in our household which I could use if I wanted to, but I always reach for my MacBook Air 11″. You never know when you have to switch from web browsing to send a quick email – and the 11″ Air’s keyboard is soooo much better than typing on glass.
So we got some juvenile little pigs here…
They should have lowered the new Touch to 249 and price it at 299.
of course, it is over price. don’t you even know? how can apple compete with amazon, google? they can’t unfortunately. they were forecasting in wrong time, wrong market. comparing to new ipod touch, every spec is just inferior excepted screen size. there is no reason to buy it. however it wasn’t coincident that APPL fell more than $20 one day. after releasing new product, apple stock didn’t fall deeply. it means something. apple is falling with no more innovation.
Apple’s margins tend to run around 40%. At $329 that’s just over $130 profit. For the sake of easier numbers, pretend they knocked off $65 to bring it to $264. Straight off they’ve halved their profit on each machine. They now have to sell double the amount to make the same money. Yes, economies of scale could come in, and they could make a little more on each one and so on, but no that much. Reducing the price doesn’t make sense on a product that all signs say will sell well. Now if iPad sales stay consistent, but the mini isn’t as good they could consider it, but they then run the risk of cannibalising iPad sales, which again won’t benefit them.
People who are looking for a cheap tablet are only going to not buy one and get an iPad if they’re basically the same price. There’s no point in Apple trying to get those customers. They’d make no money off them, and they won’t spend more down the line. In a sense, they’d rather lumber other companies with them.
The only way Apple could have made it economically worthwhile to compete with these cheaper devices is to make the iPad mini worse, use an A4 chip, smaller screen, smaller battery, etc. That would likely cannibalise some of their sales, lumber them with customers who are unlikely to upgrade to something else, and make their other products look worse by association.
I’m not going to consider an iPad mini, because my first gen iPad still does a good job, and I don’t consider an A5 chip a big enough step up for an upgrade I would hope to get a further 2-3 year’s life out of. I’ll no doubt look at a 4th gen iPad in the next 6 months or so, or wait for the 5th, or 2nd mini. As it is I’m upgrading my iPhone 4s to a 5 so I don’t have the budget for two updates in quick succession. Which isn’t a problem. Apple will get some more money from me in due course.
Of course, I’ve ignored things like taxes from the example, but the point is still valid.
The way to tell if the price is too high is to see if they sell them. For Apple, that means wait and see how long it takes for shipping dates to slip. I’ll bet some sandwich-sliced rare roast beef and the rest of this colby-jack cheese they don’t keep up with demand for the first month or so.