Quote:
Originally Posted by athlonkmf
Would you still buy a black and white TV nowadays?
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People do.
I might do so, for some specific, specialized purpose, but the way you meant the question, no. No I wouldn't.
You may well be right on what you're saying about the feature set on such a low-priced device, but if you look at the $99 Z22 as an example, and compare its feature set to the original Palm 5000 (which was better than four times the price at the time), I think you'll agree that the Z22 pretty much flattens the original P-5000.
Features tend to get cheaper the longer they're available. Power locks used to add thousands of dollars to a car's price, now they're a few hundred, I could list supporting examples for this for a long, long time before I ran out of them.
So, that being said, yeah, I do see something with the feature set of the current Sony Reader, with a nice chassis (if not, perhaps, quite as fine as the one that the Reader has) eventually being offered for under $200. In fact, there will probably eventually be devices with the
iLiad's feature set, probably even better, for that low a price.
It's a market pressure thing, if things behave the way they pretty much always behave, there will be really high-dollar, high-end versions, and versions that are lower end for lower prices, and the feature sets of the
entire range of devices will continue to improve. That is, of course, until something upsets the entire dynamic, of course.
The prices of the bottom end of the range will be determined by how cheaply the hardware con be gotten and assembled, Aside from the e-ink, the rest of it has an estimated cost (by folks who ought to know what such parts can be had for) below $50. If the e-ink panel were to drop to a point that
it only accounted for, say, $50 (it's somewhere around $150~$200 for a 6" one, near as we can puzzle out), then you've got a base hardware cost of only $100 (one-half to one-third the present one), then it's only a matter of how cheaply it could be put together, and shipped out, and they're always dialing those processes in as tightly as they can.
Bear in mind that I'm talking about
years worth of time -- the first Zire came out for $99 about 8 years after the P-5000, for instance, so I think that in 10 years or so, we might well see such a low price for this level of device.
Disclaimer: all of this is my own opinion (
not an attempt to make authoritative predictions about future events) and, while based on observed past events, is
still a product of complex chemical reactions that may exist only in my brain.
