see HP dint price it right..who said it was HW or SW?
TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#52What I find interesting are the anecdotes (of which I've now seen several) of first-time tablet owners buying TouchPads because they're so cheap. One has to wonder if HP hasn't inadvertently created a whole new group of future iPad owners.
I guess this is also quite a good marketing plan. Now with over 250,000 tablets in the market, it ruins the ipad market + creates a nice pool of app developers.
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#53It took a while to get through, but I was able finally able to order one through the HP Small & Medium Business Store (http://www.hp.com/sbso/). Had to pay for shipping though.
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#54What I find interesting are the anecdotes (of which I've now seen several) of first-time tablet owners buying TouchPads because they're so cheap. One has to wonder if HP hasn't inadvertently created a whole new group of future iPad owners.
I guess this is also quite a good marketing plan. Now with over 250,000 tablets in the market, it ruins the ipad market + creates a nice pool of app developers.
Not really.
The ipad sold (as near as I can find) nearly 14.8M first gen and another 10M+ second gen [1]. Thus the ipad market is roughly 100x bigger, which that multiple growing every day. I can't see why you'd possibly choose to develop an app for a market that starts off 100x as small, doesn't have neighboring markets like iphones/ipod touches which use the same api and tooling, and for which the main developer has just bailed.
[1] http://ipod.about.com/od/ipadmodelsandterms/f/ipad-sales-to-...
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#55goes to prove they had a desirable product, wrong price point!
Err, yeah, but it's priced below cost
Are you sure of that? Even if that's the case, it still goes to show you that there is a huge market for a tablet at that price point, and that HP's previous price point was a deal breaker for the vast majority of people. Maybe it's not yet economically feasible to manufacture a decent tablet of appreciable quality at 100 USD.
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share some of these? Should be interesting reading. I'm mostly seeing nerds going crazy at the cheap hackable tablet.
Check out the various threads on slickdeals.net. There are literally over a thousand pages (split among multiple threads) of people scrambling to buy these at the discounted prices. Very few of the people there are geeks, mostly just normal folks trying to jump in on what is seen as a huge value (~75% price drop over a single day). Seeing those forums will also show you why you will never be able to buy one of these…
I purchased one at 12:40 PM PST today from Amazon, at full retail price. Four hours later, they promised me to issue a refund so the price was the $99 HP price.
It wasn't incredibly difficult to get one, if you really wanted to.
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, down vote at will! My point wasn't that the current price was the right price, but that it was overpriced before. Clearly, there is a demand for the product. Maybe an experiment with a happy medium would have been a good experiment before tossing out the entire product.
Yeah, but your assumption is that HP, the company that has made thousands of products since 1939 doesn't know how to price things. Or that they know and chose to price the Touchpad for a extremely high profit margin. We know how much the parts cost[1], and that's but 1 small part of the overall cost to produce the tablet. Chances are that the Touchpad was priced correctly, and that anything they could have cut and re…
I want to believe you - it seems logical. But everything in front of me suggests they do not know how to price things! If you disagree with me, that's okay. But I have to believe they could have sold every single unit today for $200 to $250 per unit. Instead, this "company that has made thousands of products since 1939" dumped them all for $99 to $149. I don't know how many units were purchased today, but I can assume it was in the 100's of thousands - it was EVERYTHING that was available and I couldn't get my hands on one quickly enough. Clearly, they could have sold them for a higher price - how high? I don't know. But my strategy would have been to discount by 30%, then 40%, then 50% until everything was gone. I must be missing something. Too simple!
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or that if they wanted to make inroads in the market, they were going to have to make the first one as a loss leader to make inroads on the market. And if anyone is going to make inroads against the iPad, that's likely what they will have to do. Nobody is going to get the economy of scale that the iPad does with their first product, and nobody is going to have superior features at a similar price point, so the only w…
How much loss can any company take? The more successful your loss leader, the higher the losses. If you sell 10 million tablets at $100 loss per tablet that's a billion dollar loss. And I'm not sure selling 10 million would even be enough of an inroad. And I'm not sure that selling them at $100 per tablet loss would make them cheap enough to sell at that quantity. It's a very delicate situation.
> And I'm not sure selling 10 million would even be enough of an inroad.
Elsewhere in this thread, earl claims that around 25 million iPads (both generations) have been sold. So selling 10 million tablets would be a pretty huge inroad.
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but your assumption is that HP, the company that has made thousands of products since 1939 doesn't know how to price things. Or that they know and chose to price the Touchpad for a extremely high profit margin. We know how much the parts cost[1], and that's but 1 small part of the overall cost to produce the tablet. Chances are that the Touchpad was priced correctly, and that anything they could have cut and re…
I want to believe you - it seems logical. But everything in front of me suggests they do not know how to price things! If you disagree with me, that's okay. But I have to believe they could have sold every single unit today for $200 to $250 per unit. Instead, this "company that has made thousands of products since 1939" dumped them all for $99 to $149. I don't know how many units were purchased today, but I can assum…
That's a different discussion. You're talking about how they should have dumped their inventory, the grandparent was talking about how they should have priced the product from the start.
My take is that they set the price so low as to clear inventory quickly. I'm sure the deals they had with retailers made a prolonged sell-off at incrementally decreasing prices undesirable.
Re: TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
#60If anybody is still looking to order, try ordering from the HP Small Business site using Opera as your browser. You might have to hit refresh at every step (since the website is unstable right now and errors out) but my order went through. In fact, I did it twice so I have 2 orders in the system. The confirmation page said that a customer service agent will be contacting me to confirm the order.