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iPad mini was a bad idea, IMO. It will be Apples first failure in recent memory.
jarcher, OWWWWW,This from the guy who was twisting my arm to pay the premium for an iMac or Mac Mini over a Windows machine. Really nice W7 HP with i7 Intel <$800 with tax delivered (no monitor but keyboard and mouse and memory card reader).Middle Mac Mini $799 base price already equals the total price of the HP. +$100 upgrade to 8GB memory, +$79 optical drive, +$20 Pages = $1075 with tax delivered with no keyboard or mouse or card reader. HP has all three of those items.Perhaps part of Apple's iPad Mini pricing is due to their not wanting to canabalize too much of the larger iPad's sales. And if they did at least the profit margins on the iPad Minis would be high. But from a PC users perspective I think Apple is too full of themselves. Disclosure: I love my iPad 3. Awesome product.
I am not going to argue against many of these valid points, however....The IPAD Mini is a 4G LTE Network capable device, while the Nexus 7 is 3G I believe, which is probably some of the reason there is a price difference between the two.
Apple MapsFinal Cut X vs Final Cut ProPing (iTunes social network)I'm sure there's more... When i noticed it lacked retina and the a6 cpu, I decided to pass, I've been without a tablet (ipad, ipad2) for a good year now and honestly don't miss it. One thing that upsets me with all tablets are the price increase for the flash storage.. $100 to jump to 32GB and $200 to jump to 64GB? We are talking about chips that cost around $10. All vendors do this as well, a total rip off .. BTW: Flash cards are tremendously slower than the internal flash, so it's not even remotely the same, it's like comparing a HDD to a Floppy drive.
Hey Don - you don't get off the hook that easy ! Even in the scenario you described the price difference is 34%. I think w/ some careful shopping you can get the memory + optical drive + Pages for under $100, so a 12.5% premium. For the quality / stability / ease of use of a Mac (and higher resale values), I think that 12.5% premium is well spent. Can NOT say the same re: the price premium for the Ipad Mini vs the competition, unfortunately. Got a 1st gen Ipad on loan, but too big / slow / heavy for me.P.s. Even the new Mac Mini has a card reader - it's on the back. Keyboard / mouse : recycle what you've got.
Price difference is 37.5% when you add in a card reader. Suggestions on where to get the optical drive cheaper? Mac Mini card reader won't read my Pro Duo Sony card but the HP readers are more versatile. Dontcha just love proprietary stuff. Yes, I would recycle my keyboard and mouse with a Mac Mini but my keyboard is 6.5 years old and will probably be >13 years old by the time I get another computer. It would be nice to start the new computer with a fresh, bugger-free keyboard.
The original (over)pricing of the 1st iphone was also a fiasco. Hopefully history will repeat itself and a few months down the road they will correct.W/ this Ipad Mini they really should have done it w/ the A6 chip, retina display, and charged $399. That way you get 80% of the new regular Ipad at 80% of the cost. I.e. its for people like me who want all the speed & features of a regular Ipad in a smaller / lighter and somewhat less expensive package. Seems straight forward. But what they put out seems a compromise that doesn't satisfy anyone : neither high end enough to place them in the premium category they usually market themselves as, and not cheap enough to truly compete w/ the likes of Nexus / Kindle / etc. So you just get less for more & feed all the nay-Sayers. I would say either $33/66 or $50/100 would be more reasonable, but hey if you can get $200 to increase the flash storage by $48, why not. In the meantime if you've got folks like me jumping ship to android for a tablet, they may find they like it well enough for a phone or mobile media devices and abandon Apple the next go around when shopping for such a device. And that's where all the money & growth is, not on the PC side. Funny how such a small thing on the price front can auger such a significant effect down the road.P.s. the memory / storage overpricing is classic premium pricing model. E.g. BMW / Mercedes / Porsche / etc charge perhaps a reasonable price for a base model, then way overcharge on the options, which is where most of the profit is. At least w/ a PC you can mostly choose to get the "base" model & add the memory / storage yourself later for much less (though this is not true w/ many mobile devices).
The original (over)pricing of the 1st iphone was also a fiasco. Hopefully history will repeat itself and a few months down the road they will correct.W/ this Ipad Mini they really should have done it w/ the A6 chip, retina display, and charged $399. That way you get 80% of the new regular Ipad at 80% of the cost. I.e. its for people like me who want all the speed & features of a regular Ipad in a smaller / lighter and somewhat less expensive package. Seems straight forward. But what they put out seems a compromise that doesn't satisfy anyone : neither high end enough to place them in the premium category they usually market themselves as, and not cheap enough to truly compete w/ the likes of Nexus / Kindle / etc. So you just get less for more & feed all the nay-Sayers. In the meantime if you've got folks like me jumping ship to android for a tablet, they may find they like it well enough for a phone or mobile media devices and abandon Apple the next go around when shopping for such a device. And that's where all the money & growth is, not on the PC side. Funny how such a small thing on the price front can auger such a significant effect down the road.P.s. the memory / storage overpricing is classic premium pricing model. E.g. BMW / Mercedes / Porsche / etc charge perhaps a reasonable price for a base model, then way overcharge on the options, which is where most of the profit is. At least w/ a PC you can mostly choose to get the "base" model & add the memory / storage yourself later for much less (though this is not true w/ many mobile devices).
Looking at the Apple Store website, I think I've answered my own question : they are still trying to sell the Ipad 2 starting at $399.....Why don't they dump that? Just do the mini & the ipad 4. Their portable devices are always more expensive but presumably more hi-spec than the competition. Why have the Ipad 2 dog still lying around......I thought they were suppose to be about selling the "best". not trying to hit different price points.
