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HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

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Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#101

Post by niels_olson »

ansy wrote: post #30
martingordon wrote: post #10

Whoever made this decision should be fired. "We took a $100m loss on the first batch of TouchPads, what's a couple million more?"

I suspect this is just HP clearing out the supply chain of already purchased parts and units still at the factory. HP's cost is probably just a few dollars per unit to ship and possibly assemble them. I find it hard to believe anyone approved an entirely new order of parts at $300 BOM just to sell them for $99.

what's BOM? Bill of Materials. Got it. BoM. Just before reading your comment I had bought a 32 gb for $270. Guess that's not a bad deal. Hopefully I can at least skype on it.

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#102

Post by rdouble »

niels_olson wrote: post #101
ansy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this is just HP clearing out the supply chain of already purchased parts and units still at the factory. HP's cost is probably just a few dollars per unit to ship and possibly assemble them. I find it hard to believe anyone approved an entirely new order of parts at $300 BOM just to sell them for $99.

what's BOM? Bill of Materials. Got it. BoM. Just before reading your comment I had bought a 32 gb for $270. Guess that's not a bad deal. Hopefully I can at least skype on it.

Bill of Materials.

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#103

Post by kinofcain »

dangrossman wrote: post #100
Tichy wrote: post #50

I find this really annoying. I already wasted too much time trying to get one in the first round. Now I am supposed to waste time again? I actually considered setting up a web service for companies doing such a thing. I think the proper way would be to create a lottery where everybody could register in peace and there would be a couple of lucky winners. A similar thing happened with sparkfun electronics when they off…

Woot.com has a "woot off" every few weeks, and one of the items that goes on sale at a random time during the day is a "bag of crap". For $8, you're promised they'll send you 3 leftover products from their warehouse. Some people have gotten really expensive products, like large LCD TVs and laptop computers, so everyone's willing to give it a try for $8. Every few weeks, without fail, before and after Amazon acquired…

Woot knows exactly what they're doing. They lose money on every bag of crap, the fact that the site goes down adds to the fun. They could rent more servers for the day (or hour) that the BOC is available for sale, but why lose even more money? They're selling out of them in seconds, and they're driving insane amounts of traffic to their site for the entire day as people hit refresh on a leakfrog looking for the BOC. That said, they have taken steps to make it a little more randomized, but only because people figured out how to game the system, and most people getting BOCs were running scripts to do it.

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#105

Post by evilduck »

ktsmith wrote: post #23
wmf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the PS3, which is a pretty good Blu-ray/Netflix/DLNA player and probably had problems with low attach rate in the first few years.

I can't recall the last time I actually used the PS3 to play a game. It's probably been more than a year. We do use it every day however to watch Netflix or Hulu. It's used a couple times a week to stream content using DLNA and Twonky Server. That being said I'd replace it in a heartbeat due to the extremely loud fan, I've not done so to this point because I'm being cheap.

The first generation PS3 is a noisy energy hog.

I picked up an AppleTV 2nd gen for Netflix and streaming media because it runs silently at 6W, compared to the fat PS3's 170-200W. Depending on how much you watch, the AppleTV might pay for itself in energy savings alone in 12-18 months.

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#106

Post by georgemcbay »

w33ble wrote: post #99
cpeterso wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on some TouchPad teardowns, manufacturing a TouchPad costs about $318 in parts plus $10 in labor. If HP sold TouchPads for $250, they would "only" lose $68. http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carr...

Right, but recouping a $68-118 loss is more feasible than recouping a $168-218 loss. There's a decent markup on their accessories and the potential for app sales. If it drives enough demand and gets companies licensing their OS and selling hardware running it, they have a chance to make it work, and it's probably money better spent than any advertising they do. Look at it this way; before the fire sale, how often did…

I agree that this firesale is a valuable lesson in pricing, and HP clearly cut the price by more than they needed to to achieve their goal of unloading existing inventory, but there are more factors at play here than price alone. I'd bet that if HP had just lowered the price to $250 they would have sold far less units than are now selling on ebay for $250.

The $99 price point set off a feeding frenzy on this sale, and once that frenzy started people who were trying to buy the unit for $99 and failing (due to all the retailers overselling stock and then cancelling orders) were able to rationalize themselves progressively higher until they were okay with the $250 price.

I'm not convinced there would have been nearly as big an uptick if this started out with a price drop to $250. Certainly sales would have jumped, but I don't think it would have been nearly as drastic as what actually happened.

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#108

Post by ktsmith »

evilduck wrote: post #105
ktsmith wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recall the last time I actually used the PS3 to play a game. It's probably been more than a year. We do use it every day however to watch Netflix or Hulu. It's used a couple times a week to stream content using DLNA and Twonky Server. That being said I'd replace it in a heartbeat due to the extremely loud fan, I've not done so to this point because I'm being cheap.

The first generation PS3 is a noisy energy hog. I picked up an AppleTV 2nd gen for Netflix and streaming media because it runs silently at 6W, compared to the fat PS3's 170-200W. Depending on how much you watch, the AppleTV might pay for itself in energy savings alone in 12-18 months.

If the Apple TV wasn't stuck at 720p I would probably consider it. I have a friend currently doing a similar setup to what I have with the PS3 via a Logitech Revue and if that ends up working out well I will probably pick one up. The addition of Android 3.0 on the Revue also makes it a bit more of an appealing idea. While I won't save as much energy over the PS3, just the reduction in fan noise will likely be worth the $99.

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#109

Post by jestar_jokin »

nkassis wrote: post #77
patrickk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears Apple doesn't make money from apps, apparently they roughly break even from the app store with a 30% cut of apps: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649475 " ...Peter Oppenheimer added, “We run the App Store just a little over breakeven,” implicitly making the case that the App Store was not a big profit generator for the company. " http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_... If Apple…

I wonder why it's so expensive to run the thing? I mean, it should be pretty cheap to deliver small applications like that. Maybe the labor to check all the new apps?

Probably licensing for all the ridiculous patents (see: Lodsys et al)

Re: HP to produce one more batch of Touchpads

#110

Post by rodh257 »

throwaway32 wrote: post #87
nkassis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why it's so expensive to run the thing? I mean, it should be pretty cheap to deliver small applications like that. Maybe the labor to check all the new apps?

i frankly wonder if there isnt some form of holywood accounting going on so their 30% cut can be "justified".

also to deter competitors from undercutting at hoping to make it up on apps (just as we are discussing about HP here). If they see that even Apple supposedly couldn't make a profit from its app store, they might be deterred.
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