Chinese whisper of low-cost Kindle-confounding iPad

Given that many a fanboy's assumption that Apple would announce a new-design iPhone earlier this month derived from claims made to market analysts by sources within Chinese component makers, you should probably treat the following with some scepticism. For what it's worth, more of those oriental moles have told Brian White, an …

[handle]

"low-cost Kindle confounding iPad"

Because you omitted a hyphen between "Kindle" and "confounding", you gave completely the opposite meaning to the headline from that which was intended.

[handle]

Ah, you fixed it at last :-)

Eats, shoots and leaves.

[Rob]

They need too...

... it's the only thing that is blocking Apple from mass market appeal is varying priced models from low to high. Android phones are out-selling iPhone 2:1 last time I read, because Android is on devices at all different price points, basic market sense your price point will always be one of the factors that appeals to mass market.

You want market saturation, build models for the rich and poor alike.

[David Beck]

iThings are "luxury goods"

Apple can't do a spread market. They have developed the brand as a luxury brand like Rolex. They will need to offer a "Tudor" equivalent to the "iThings" so as not to debase the current lux brand.

[Arctic fox]

I am not sure about this one.

What is Amazon's big strength and why is it selling the "Fire" so cheap (I pose the question rhetorically)? Content, content and yet again content. Even if Apple made a version of the iPad intended to compete with Amazon's price they would still not be challenging Amazon on content. Apple make very well built kit (doesn't float my boat but fairs fair) and have a famously loyal customer base, however, can they seriously challenge Amazon over content? *That* is the issue here.

[Anonymous Coward]

reckon they are going to try

what with iCloud and iTunes and all those deals with the studios and labels ...

[Anonymous Coward]

times are a-changing

"Apple has traditionally steered clear of low-price products, preferring to trade sales volumes for the value a premium brand brings."

Don't reckon that model works any more - not with content consumption devices like iPads and iPods. They've got to be cheap enough to compete because there's not a lot of secret sauce. The payback is revenue from the content that's consumed.

So I, for one, don't discount the rumours. Content /is/ king, in this case.

[Dave 126]

Possibly, but...

Would a low-cost iPad be competing against low-cost Android etc rivals, or would it cannibalise sales of the higher-priced premium iPads? Or, put differently:

How much money does Apple make from having the healthy margins on its premium iPads, and how much does it make from selling people content on their iPads?

I suspect that the people charged with answering that questions are well paid and fair better educated in such matters than me.

[jubtastic1]

If the IPad3 has a retina display

Then keeping the IPad2 around as a cheaper option makes sense, like the 3GS to the iPhone4, reducing internal storage to 8GB will probably knock enough of the costs for them to drop the price.

[nick47]

I don't think we'll see an iPad update for quite a while.

Next iPad won't come out for at least another 18 months. They don't need to update it because it's already awesome.