Quote:
Originally Posted by 709
b) If you think the smaller iPad is a more desirable product, then the $70 difference looks fine - it's just a smaller, lighter iPad 2 after all (with a few hardware/software advantages over the larger iPad (camera, Lightning, Siri)).
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Bingo.
This goes back to the big point I was trying to make in the speculation thread: the iPad mini's headline feature
is not it's price. It just isn't. If it was, it would be $299 or $249.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, because Apple pitches products on their price just about never.
No, the headline feature of the iPad mini is the fact
that it's mini. Same as the iPods mini and nano, same as the Mac mini. Apple doesn't make cheap. They make small. Sometimes small and cheap line up, like with the iPod nano. Sometimes they don't, like with the iPhone 5. But the point here is that Apple didn't set out to make a cheaper iPad... they set out to make a smaller one, and then when all was said and done, the fact that it was cheaper to make was something of a semi-intentional side effect.
Don't think of the iPad mini's size as a compromise they made to get the price down, because Apple doesn't make compromises to keep the price down. No, think of the iPads mini's price as a happy coincidence due to Apple wanting to make a smaller, thinner iPad.
Or, think about it this way: I'm sure Apple could have gotten the price down to $299 if they wanted, by cutting corners somewhere. The cameras, the screen, the processor, the storage, the RAM, whatever. If Apple
wanted to make a $299 iPad mini with a 30% margin, they could have. But they didn't. They made the iPad they thought was ideal for the person who wanted a smaller iPad, and then they priced it accordingly.
I'm not saying that price
wasn't a consideration for this iPad, I'm saying it wasn't a
primary consideration. After all, they spent pretty much the entire presentation talking about it's size, but the price almost seemed as if it was an afterthought. Nothing like the original iPad intro, where the $499 price was a big unveiling, because they knew it would make a splash.
They knew $329 wasn't going to make a splash, so they didn't push it.