I am looking to buy myself an Ipad 2 WI-FI and was stuck by the almost uniform price everywhere I looked which struck me as odd at the best and down-right suspicious at worst. Then the disparity between 16GB and 32GB a difference of £80 . Could someone please explain A) why the uniformity of pricing? and B )the justification for the large price increase with the 64GB version?
Uniform pricing is because apple sell at a price where by you make hardly any money so sticking to the retail is worth while other wise you will make nothing. Price differences = because of the above and the fact that they can.
andrew8200m I am impressed with the speed of your post and thank you. Your answer to my post, I suspected as much.
Also if the 32gb and 64gb were only as expensive over the 16gb model as it costs to upgrade the storage, everybody would buy the 64gb would be worth the small rise in price.
And if people buy the 16gb iPad 2, and run out of space quickly, when the iPad 3 comes out they will want another one with a larger storage, as they recognise their mistakes.
Pardon,I not sure of the relevance of your post not understand why it would be a mistake to purchase a 16GB iPad.
He is saying that for the iPad 3 to look more attractive it has to offer substantial advantages over its predecessor, RAM being one. A 64Gb iPad 3 does not look as cool if you already have a 64Gb iPad 2. But back to the pricing. The reseller mark-up (hence profit) is nearly 50%. But why would a reseller deviate from the RRP if iPads are already selling like hotcakes? And you can bet that there is some price control by Apple. It would not want its own shops to be undersold by a reseller.
Reseller margin is more like 3-5%. It stops company's that "always have to be cheaper" from slagging a product down to a worthless level causing the industry to follow. There are many etailers that do that and we as customers then think others are overpriced. The public is naive and unfortunately reading over these forums generally clueless or even stupid when it cones to pricing. For a business to be successful you need to make 10% or more ideally overall. Many etailers (I'll not point fingers) slag pricing down to a point where a product is worth nothing. If you buy a product at £99 ex and sell it for £100 ex your margin is 1%. If you buy at £99 and sell at £103 ex vat your maybe £4 more than a few other sites and will sell probably half as many but you've still made even with half the sales, twice the profit. There are too many company's devaluing products, that's why apple don't allow you to make much on there's. Let let you sell it in a hope you sell add on products that are worth more profit wise than the main unit. So next time you see and offer saying "was £100, now £90" the likelyhood is someone will see that, make there's £89.50 and like idiots leave it at that price devaluing the product for the whole industry.
Nothing odd or suspicious it is an Apple product and they always have uniform pricing. I actually quite like it, it is a premium/unique product and therefore they can set the price to be what they want it to be.
I think you will find that that statement is untrue, as they were selling music tracks higher in this country than elsewhere and although they did try to justify by mumbling about different tax rates the value of the pound against the dollar, much cleverer people than me debunked these arguments. I have also just Googled the latest ipod touch prices and there is a great variation, so I am assuming your comment is just about the ipad as opposed to all Apple products which you seem to allude to.
One of the reasons Apple has been so successful over the last few years is because they can now control the entire chain; design, R&D, advertising, marketing and sales (through their Apple stores). They make a much better margin in the Apple stores because of this, and strictly control the prices they sell to resellers (Dixons, Comet et al) to ensure Apple store prices are competitive.
If I make 5% on IT kit I class myself as lucky. iPad's are currently coming in at less that 1% markup
