Tech Stuff

Is the iPad overpriced?

One criticsim I hear a lot about the iPad is that it overpriced. Someone recently said that you shouldn’t buy the iPad as it as too expensive.

Well £399 for the 16GB WiFi model is a lot more money that the £69.99 that you can buy an Android Tablet for from Amazon.

That isn’t really a fair comparison in my opinion, as it isn’t a proper Android tablet, as it’s not running Honeycomb and only has 2GB of RAM.

The Acer Iconia TAB A500 is a much fairer comparison, it costs
£349.96 from Amazon (though the list price is £417.80 which is more than the iPad!!!).

So you can not only buy a similar specified Android tablet for cheaper than the iPad you can also buy really cheap Android Tablets for less than £100 even from Asda.

So is the iPad overpriced?

Well yes the price is more than the price of Android tablets, so from that basic definition yes it is overpriced.

However though some people are price sensitive, price is rarely the only factor that we take into account when we buy something.

For example, very few people buy the value cola from the supermarket, most people will buy Coca-Cola or Pepsi even though it is more expensive.

Price is one factor to consider when buying something, but generally other factors come into play.

It’s the same with the iPad, though its price is more than the price of similar Android tablets, people buy the iPad because of factors other than price. Saying it is overpriced is irrelevant as the price is generally not the deciding factor when buying a tablet. This is echoed in the sales.

1.21 million Android tablets have been sold, and in the same time period 28.73 million iPads have been sold by Apple. These figures were derived from a recent article by John Gruber.

Breakdown by Google of Android devices in use by screen size. “Xlarge” is defined as any screen 7 inches or larger. By Google’s count, only 0.9% of activated in-use devices are tablets. Multiply that by the 135 million total Android “devices” that Larry Page announced last week during Google’s quarterly analyst call, and you get 1.21 million tablets. Compare that to the 28.73 million iPads Apple sold through the end of June.

This is not a small difference in sales, this is a huge significant difference in sales.

The reasons are probably varied, but price isn’t going to be a big reason. People buy the iPad for many different reasons and to say that the iPad is too expensive or overpriced says more about you than it does the iPad.