Windows 8 tablet PC makers: We can't compete with the iPad's price

&#62;Apple effectively gives iOS away (it’s a hardware company, after all), and Amazon gets Android for free<p>While I get what the author's saying here, it's a bit disingenuous to call either of those situations "free". Both companies invest nontrivial amounts of money into their OS. Apple develops their in-house OS, and Android is a "some assembly required" product.

I knew this would happen, but nobody seemed to believe it. If they can't even compete with the ARM versions because of the cost of Windows, imagine how much more expensive the Intel tablets will be - and they probably won't even support any retina-like resolution (definitely not on Atom).<p>Also keep in mind that the costs to manufacturers usually double at retail ($300 components - $600 product, etc). So $100 on a Windows 8 license to manufacturers, will be about $200 added to the tablet's price at retail.

I think the author failed to understand one thing:<p>there are will be 2 kinds of Win8 tablets: x86 and ARM based.<p>The x86 tablets are essentially full-blown PCs, to which you can connect mouse and keyboard and they compete with netbooks, laptops and PCs, so the Windows license for them will be probably $90+.<p>The license for Win8 on ARM tablets will be much cheaper ($10-$30), because they compete with iPads and Android tablets.

From one of the comments :<p>"there will be no legacy Windows applications retrocompatibilty"<p>Is this true? If it is, then this is a deal breaker. The only reason I've been waiting so long to buy a Windows tablet is because I assumed it would be backwards compatible with my desktop applications(of my Win7 machine). If what the comment above says is true, then I guess it will be either an Android tablet or the iPad..

I can really feel the irony here - one of the biggest gripes of Apple critics was the price of their products. It'll be interesting to see if things have turned around.

For once I'd really like to see Microsoft position its product as a high end product instead of always trying to undercut everybody on price.<p>If they think their product is better, then sell it as such. Actually say your product is better and therefore, it's going to cost more.

I think at this stage of the game if Microsoft has any hope of penetrating the market they pretty much have to subsidize or make WinRT licenses free for approved devices rather than charge for it and if that's successful recoup the losses off the market.<p>Apple seems to certainly be in a position where they could do this and absolutely crush the competition, they must just not feel threatened with the competing products available today

It doesn't seem right. If I go to <a href="http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet" rel="nofollow">http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet</a> and search for chinese android tables I can find competitive prices there, some at ~ USD 100, so adding the license tag will not change that much.<p>"In China We Trust"

Wouldn't it be possible that it is 90-100 Taiwan dollar instead of US dollar. than the license cost is 3.4 US dollar. It seems to me that it would be suicide of MS to command such a high price for its tablet OS. It would make the tablet as expensive as its desktop OS. Not a great strategy to conquer the "iPad market". A pricing akin to windows mobile would seem to be more logical.

Are we talking ARM or Intel. If its the latter, I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8 tablets are an order of magnitude more useful than an iPad. ARM? No chance.<p>Either that or they don't want to compete with the iPad...