Apple looking at game console business

[rocketpig]

TheBigFatJ said:

rocketpig said:

CrashMan said:
And I am sure Apple will rip people off as much as they do with iPod pricing.

Yeah, $249 for an 80GB iPod is highway robbery.

/sarcasm

When you get apple hardware you're trading sexiness for functionality. The hardware is kind of expensive for the functionality you get -- you can find cheaper MP3 players that can play more formats, etc. The lower end is particularly where Apple keeps things more expensive. Look at the macbook air: there's no new technology there, it's just a bunch of existing technology packed into a sexier package than the other guys make.

With the iphone you pay a lot extra and don't even get a 3G phone. My coworker got a motorola a1200 from Hong Kong several years ago and it's smaller and sexier than the iphone with a touch-screen and a clear flip cover (so you can always see the main screen). It was also kind of rude of Apple to charge their early adopters $200 extra for the first month or so when they're still making over $1000 profit per iphone sold with a plan.

That said, Apple's laptop prices are among their most fair prices. If you want to see an example of the Apple tax, try buying some memory from them. We have some pretty old machines here with 16GB of memory that we got from a third party because the exact same memory (same manufacturer) cost 1/3rd as much from a non-apple vendor.

Trust me, I've been an Apple user for years. The ONLY thing I buy from them is a sealed product that I cannot get elsewhere. If you buy memory from them, you're a fool.

While their products are not cheap, most aren't completely out of line with the competition either. Yes, their formats are limited but I hardly view that as a major constraint because they play the most important one, MP3. That's not a limitation to me, though it could be to you.

And I know that Motorola phone you're talking about, a friend of mine has one. While I wish the iPhone was 3G (and it's rather stupid that it isn't), I have a hard time seeing how that Motorola is sexier than an iPhone. Have you messed with the iPhone for more than five minutes? The interface absolutely blows every other phone out of the water. While I still haven't unlocked mine (and it is annoying that to get the functionality I will want in the future, that's pretty much mandatory), the iPhone brought a lot of revolutionary tech to the phone industry that other companies just hadn't thought about or were too cheap to research.

Just the multi-touch interface, ambient light sensor, and alignment sensors put the phone in a class of its own.