People seem to tend to wonder why the iPhone is so expensive I mean costing 600$ and a 2 year contract with AT&T is no small amount for a student to cover yet they’ve sold over 700k of the little buggers so far, driven mostly on a ton of hype from the media monsters but anyways. Something always made me wonder how come Meizu can produce the same phone basically, with more space and a better screen and 3g …. and you know all the other extras, for nearly half the price of the iPhone? Ya their releasing later but do they really expect pricing for materials to drop between now and the end of the year by that much?
The answer is NO, the fact is apple’s just overcharging the hell out of the iPhone. In fact analyst firm Portelligent dissected the iPhone and determined that the parts that make up the 4gb iphone would run around 200$ in large quantities while the 8gb would cost around 20$ more for construction. Portelligent acknowledges that without knowing which company’s apple uses for components they can’t be sure of exact pricing but their pricing is pretty exact. For instance the touch screen is said to be the most costly item at around 60$ but since the screen has no manufacturing marks they can’t be sure but they believe its from a german company named balda.
So at 200$ selling at 499$ that’s a fairly hefty markup if you ask me, one that i think just shows how much they want to milk the initial hype craze for. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of at&t contracts their locking people into. It was ok back when we were just dealing with an mp3 player that Apple was trying to corner the market and could charge whatever they wanted, i mean at that stage they owned the phone market, but with the phone market spanning billions of phones sold, and from what i recall an active group of 100′s of millions of phones, from strong company’s like samsung and motorola and blackberry could the feature cripple iPhone really stand to keep its 250% markup and very harsh contract requirements? Especially when we all know samsung and the others will probably be releaseing their own next gen phones (with actual nextgen features like atleast 3G) soon.
It sure seems to me at least that Apple priced the iPhone specifically to take advantage of the initial hype and fanboy craze, but does that mean a early price drop within a year considering how fast competition in the phone market develops? If so how exactly are those early adopters going to feel?
Source: InHouse/NewLaunches
