Apple’s Lower Prices Are All Part of The Plan

Price is the reason why no manufacturer has been able to compete with the iPad. It's not only a tremendous product as far as tablets go, it's relatively cheap. Look at the latest high-end tablet offerings; all subjectively "worse", most more expensive than the Apple product.<p>The market-share argument against Apple will disappear as they strengthen their supply chain and become more efficient. They will become great AND cheap products. As someone who recently purchased his first Mac (decked out 13" MBA) and loves it, this is good news for everyone.

I call BS. A macbook air might be "cheap" if you decide to limit your comparisons to "thin" notebooks but Best Buy has 40 models of notebooks for $200-$299 and another 40 models for $300-$399. The $300-$399 aren't bad either. 3-4gig, I3, AMD 6910, DVD player, etc. etc. You can get 3 of them for the price of 1 macbook air. Got 3 kids, how about 3 notebooks instead of 1?<p>iPad? The competition hasn't really even started yet. It's only a matter of time before the $200-$300 tablets that don't suck start appearing. Will Apple lower the price of the iPad to match? I doubt it.<p>Phones are a different market. Because almost all phones are bought with contracts there's been very little incentive to make the phones cheaper. Unlike notebooks which you just buy outright.<p>I'm not saying in any way Apple's products aren't worth it. I have an iPad, 2 Macbook pros, A Mac Mini and an 8 core Mac Pro. But I'm not under any delusion that they are cheap compared to the alternatives. I'll still buy them because I like them but claiming a macbookair is a cheap notebook is like claiming a BWM is cheap car. It's only cheap if you massively restrict the options you are comparing them to.

The challenge for Apple here is to maintain both the 'premium' cache while remaining competitively priced.<p>As this article states, they've done very well in marketing the Air. Everybody seems to be comparing Apple's $999 11" Air with competitors 13" products. The 13" starts at $1300, so the competitors are often priced $300+ less, with the exclusion of the Samsung Series 9.

I'm definitely in the minority here but sometimes it's good to have some counterpoints about the new MacBook Air. I recently bought one with 13" thinking it would be my best computer ever. Well, hardware/power-wise it is incredibly fast! But I found out some things that make it almost unbearable.<p>There are only three ways to interact with a laptop and I believe it fails deeply in two of them.<p>The trackpad is very much ok, probably the best one I ever tried. But the keyboard... While the design looks amazing, keys are really thin and feel cheap. As soon as I turned the laptop on and needed to enter my Apple ID, the first time I pressed the Alt key it just came out! This hasn't happened yet to any other key on this laptop but I used to have an iMac with a similar keyboard and three keys stopped working. You can feel the fragility of the keys by putting one finger on the top of the key and another on the bottom, and then press them alternatively: the key bounces like a boat. While I can't say it's the worst keyboard I ever had (because I owned an iMac), I never had such problem with any other laptop or external keyboard. I could also talk about the really small size of the arrow keys. I miss them all the time. And the return key is also much smaller than every other keyboard I have tried before.<p>The other way to interact with the laptop (more like it interacting with me) is the screen. I was crazy about having a really good definition screen and it is. But operating systems are not made for resolutions like that so it all ends up with really really small text everywhere and zooming all the time because you will mostly never get into a text properly sized for a screen like this. If you use Windows you can set the DPI to whatever you want but webpages text will still be incredibly small.<p>So I have a hard time typing and reading on it. I can't recommend it to anyone.

What were the well-regarded elements to creating a successful product again?<p>Be the first. Be the best. Be the cheapest.<p>The iPad has all of these elements in the tablet space at the moment.

I'm surprised nobody (including the article author) has mentioned Tim Cook, particularly as this new shift to lower pricing that he talks about coincides with TC taking the helm. This is what Mr. Cook does - squeezes every last bit of optimization and efficiency out of every step in the supply line, reducing costs, hence giving them leeway to reduce their prices while keeping their enviable margins.

Doing a little digging, it seems that it's $199 on Verizon with a contract. But you need a data package on top. It's $60 for 450 minutes.<p>Go for the Droid Bionic and it's $300 with a 2 year contract. So that _looks_ more expensive, but it's not, because it's $40/month for 450 minutes.<p>So over the two years that's an extra $480 dollars you spend on the Apple, to save $100 up-front.<p>I don't see how that's cheaper.