autopilot;459864 Wrote: > It's a simple single piece of moulded plastic. I have one right here, it > could be made for less than a dollar. I can't understand it, even it > they are made to order in limited qualities, that price is absolutely > crazy. For the price of two of these i could by a Squeezebox radio, and > that's had a lot more development costs too.
You're actually quite wrong about the cost to produce these. From my experience getting parts like this made, I would estimate the tooling cost at no less than $25,000. Probably significantly more for the level of quality that Logitech puts into their plastics. Then add logistics, packaging, shipping and handling for a very specialized product with low volumes. The marginal cost in raw plastic material, you're right, is nearly free, but that is not where the cost to produce one of these - it's all up front. And I didn't even mention design and engineering - sure it's a simple part, but that work is not free either. The economies of scale, or lack thereof, are completely different from most any other plastic product that you might be comparing it to. Does that mean it should be priced at $100? If that's too far above the gag threshold, maybe a better strategy would be for them to consider it a loss leader for selling more touches. But they may be doing that already - they may end up taking a loss even at $100 - that depends how many they sell, but there is very little elasticity on something like this. You can't expect to sell millions of them by pricing it like any other piece of plastic. -- seanadams ------------------------------------------------------------------------ seanadams's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=68046 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
