Quote:
Originally Posted by BenLee
Exactly. I wouldn't begin to make a claim like "eReaders are history" until the iPad and e-ink devices are significantly closer in price.
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I'm not sure that's ever going to happen.
Way back near the beginning of the PC era, prices were considerably higher than today. I seem to remember a Compaq 386 running somewhere near to $3K when it first came out.
But I don't think we've seen the same kind of drop in prices over the past 15 years or so. It seems to me that a PC or a laptop costs about the same as it did years ago, but the amount of power, memory and storage space for that same money has gone up. That seems to be trend. Manufacturers add more capabilities to the devices rather than drop the price.
So my guess is that the iPad isn't going to come down in price much, but rather you'll see upgraded power in each generation. There's going to be a wave of competing devices in the next year or so, so we'll see what that does to the market.
On the other hand, the big threshold for eReaders is the cost of the eInk screen. That costs something like $50 or so. I'm just guessing here, but I say that we're still way at the small end of the economies of scale for eInk. There's lots of room for increased volume to drag the price of that component way down. Look for a $5 cost for the screen in a few years.
And that means a $50 eReader, or less, is, at least in my opinion, an inevitability with something like 5 years. And I think it's going to go that way because there's simply a limit to the number of features and power you need in a dedicated eReader. So the manufacturers can't keep adding capabilities and keep the price stable.