Guys. some things to consider for the base model pricing:
1. Apple consistently makes
around 40% margins on its key products.
2. Andy Rubin stated the Nexus 7 is
sold at cost. Note that its not sold at a major loss (eg: game consoles at launch). it's sold at 200 bucks at cost so that's how much it costs them to build and probably also factors in the initial design effort.
3. Apple will almost surely be using older tech in this mini iPad so there's not much new design cost aside from the new casing and screen size.
4. Apple has the ability build their devices cheaper than their competition since they build in such large quantities so the iPad mini will likely cost about the same
or less than the Nexus 7 to build. so that's around 200 bucks.
probably a bit less.
6. So add 40% to, say, $180. what do you get? $250. what kind of margin would this thing have if it cost $300 (and still cost 200 to build and ship)?
over 65%
The baseline, el-cheapo 8GB model will be 250 bucks. a premium price over the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7, with a likely cheaper screen and 2 year old hardware. It's not like Apple will be pushing technical boundaries with this.
$250 is entirely possible and I think it's very likely since I doubt Apple will want to concede the entire sub-500 dollar tablet market to amazon/ google in order to try to grab over 60% profit margin on the new device. Cook even said he's aware of price umbrellas and doesn't there to be any obvious ones for the ipad.
