Category Archives: Pricing

Sony: Still Out Of Their Damned Mind

I went to the SonyStyle Store in NYC yesterday.

I’m very curious about the Sony Xperia T2 Ultra that Best Buy is selling for US$249 (note that the website price of US$299 is incorrect).

But all they have are dummy units. I really wanted to experience that TriLuminous screen.

So, to their store.

It was a miserable experience.

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Filed under Friction, Marketing, Pricing, Stupid

Whatever Happened To Apple’s “For The Rest Of Us…”?

“Nobody will pay $10,000 for an Apple Watch!” & other reasons you can’t sell shit

Unless you’ve done research, every opinion you have about what people will or won’t buy comes straight from your butt.

You say you won’t buy an Apple Watch. Fine, I believe you. (Although… perhaps you said the same thing about iPods, iPhones and iPads.)

It doesn’t matter, though, whether you buy or not. Lots and lots of other people will.

Let me repeat: You are not your customer. There’s only one of you. You won’t be paying yourself.

Emphasis in the original.

Harumph:

The Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983 and cost US$9,995 (approximately $23,700 in today’s dollars.) It was the very first personal computer system with a graphical user interface (GUI) to be sold commercially. It used a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 5 MHz and had 1 MB RAM.

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Filed under Apple: The Company, Marketing, Pricing, Reference, Stupid

The China Price Ceiling

The one barrier China’s smartphone companies can’t seem to break

I asked a few Chinese friends why they thought domestic phones don’t tend to sell well past RMB 3,000, and got several variations of the same basic answer: once you’re spending that much anyway, why not just spend a little more to get an iPhone? A China Business News article on the phenomenon makes the same basic point.

Price is the main factor that killed Tomato: Tablet Maker Tomato Out Of Business.

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Filed under Pricing

Teclast Adds Third International Seller

TeclastThree Sellers

QH-Store at AliExpress

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Filed under Android, Marketing, Pricing, Windows Tablets

Perspective

And here earlier was this:

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Filed under Pricing

Amazon: “We Win, You Lose.”

Escape from Stalag $7: Why Amazon’s Pricing Box Is Bad for Indies

But after all the fireworks and fun, the one thing I never ever received from AAAG were coherent answers to my questions, particularly the most important one of all. And that is: Why has Amazon placed indies in a $7 dollar pricing box? Why does it grab 65% of your revenue (not counting its transmission fees, which it charges on every transfer and which vary based on book size) if you price under $2.99 and the same if you charge over $9.99? This is an issue of critical importance to indies because it is not financially feasible to hand over that level of margin to a reseller for a download service. (And if you think Amazon is paying you a “royalty” when you fork over that 65% operating expense, please stop reading now. You are incurably ignorant and I cannot help you.)

Generally I tend to stay the fuck away from publishing these days. Why continue to bang my head against a wall?

But sometimes a post rises to the level of requiring reading by others.

The above is such a post.

Amazon isn’t concerned about how many books it sells as being good for writers. It wants to sell as many books as possible because it’s good for Amazon.

If Amazon could sell fifty-seven billion books yet have each writer make only a dollar in a year, that’d suit Amazon just fine.

And while I focus on Amazon here — because the originating post is about it — this holds true for all companies that have managed to create a stranglehold in any area.

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Filed under Amazon Kindle, Digital Overthrow, Friction, Pricing

Are Cheap Android Tablets A Brochure To Buy An iPad?

Steve Jobs, 1985, Playboy interview:

Playboy: How about the low-priced computers: Commodore and Atari?

Jobs: I consider those a brochure for why you should buy an Apple II or Macintosh. I think people have already determined that the sub-$500 computers don’t do very much. They either tease people to want more or frustrate people completely.

Playboy: What about some of the smaller portables?

Jobs: They are OK if you’re a reporter and trying to take notes on the run. But for the average person, they’re really not that useful, and there’s not all that software for them, either. By the time you get your software done, a new one comes out with a slightly bigger display and your software is obsolete. So nobody is writing any software for them. Wait till we do it — the power of a Macintosh in something the size of a book!

I did a screensnap of that too.

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Filed under Android, Apple: The Company, Pricing, Quoted, Reference

Xiaomi Smartphones: US$65 Target Price

There are two key issues to Xiaomi getting involved with CPUs. PadNews has an analysis, reprinted from “21st century business Herald” [Google Translate].

1) Patent protection. There are issues regarding licensing fees that have to be paid to major patent holders such as Qualcomm, Nokia (now Microsoft), and even Samsung.

2) Lowering phone prices. Here in the U.S., we find China tech to be bargain priced. In the majority of the world, it’s still priced too high in places such as India and other developing nations.

Bing Translator does the best job on this paragraph:

Just a year ago at the Beijing Forum on Microelectronics, Lei has publicly called for: chip industry should learn from the Internet free of charge, in accordance with the cost price, “Why sell thirty or forty dollars, instead of three or four dollars? If the chip free, millet high-end cell phones only 500 Yuan.” The Lei predicted that the next 3-5 years, was” certainly is based on sand, the chip company sold chips and achieved great success. ”

At that time, price 699, 799 USD red rice has just released, Lei presented at the event: “I did not expect red rice is so successful. Low end of the market there was so big, so strong market demand.” Red Rice’s success in bringing the Lei is determined in the low-end mass market a go.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

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Filed under Android, Digital Overthrow, Pricing

Teclast Adds Second International Seller

I don’t know when this was added to their English-language site:

TeclastSellersPage110114

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Filed under Android, Marketing, Pricing, Stupid

iPhone 6 Is Crazy Expensive In India

Via Weibo communiqué:

iPhone6IndiaPriceWeibo01

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Filed under iOS, Pricing