Somebody please send a $250 netbook to Bezos, or two for a Kindle's price.
Not to mention, we have no idea what the cost is on a Kindle. Netbooks use commodity components that are widely available from numerous manufacturers. The same is not true of e-ink displays. This is at least partly a factor in the perceived high cost of an ebook reader.
We also don't know what kind of arrangement Amazon has with Sprint. Amazon gives a few cents to Sprint when you purchase something using Whispernet. Maybe Sprint also gets a flat fee every time a Kindle is sold. We simply don't know.
There's also the issue of limited competition in the ebook market right now. There are only a few manufacturers of quality e-ink readers and on top of it all the Kindle is the only game in town if you want to buy ebooks from Amazon. This is relatively new technology and the price will go down. We've seen it before with the components that go into a $250 netbook. This is economics 101.
Pixel Qi's screen will narrow that gap eventually, at the price of being less available and more expensive in the short and medium-term.
- Netbooks are usually based on Atom processors that are cheap when compared to Core2 and other more traditional PC processors but are much more expensive than the cellphone-class ARM processor used in the Kindle
- Netbooks use higher-capacity batteries because Atom processors use more juice than the ARM in the Kindle.
- The Kindle uses far more commoditized components than a netbook does - it uses cellphone-class components while netbooks use PC-class ones.
- Netbooks also have more RAM - the Kindle certainly has less than a gigabyte of RAM - I would risk the Kindle has no more than 128 megs, soldered on the motherboard - which is also cheaper than mounting RAM into a socket.
- The e-ink displays are not new technology - a couple years ago my carrier (in Brazil) offered me a Motorola phone with e-ink display. It was an entry-level "dumbphone" and I did not need one. The only "new" thing in the Kindle DX display is its size and design considerations that follow from it.
A user that wants a thin device doesn't care why the device is thin. Netbooks aren't as thin as a Kindle, period.
I would happily trade a couple millimeters thickness for longer battery life, wi-fi, a hard-drive and network-printer emulation software so I could print my stuff to "paper stacks" on the device. Unfortunately, the absence of such device indicates strongly that those needs are mine only.
I look forward to hacking the Tech Crunch thingie to suit those needs.
Pocket calculators have LCD displays for decades, too. That does not mean that your 22" inch LCD screen has no "new technology" and should be cheap.
And Kindles are not that different from any other e-paper display device bundled with e-readers from many other sources.
The Kindle should be cheap to build
This discussion lacks a price list for all parts. Until then, it's my common sense against yours.
Or better: my biases against your biases.
US$ 60 for the display doesn't look that expensive. At US$ 190 total cost of manufacture for the 2, I would risk the wireless free forever subsidy seems to be a substantial part of the unit cost. Would it be a safe bet to estimate the display of the DX to be around US$ 120?
So, again, I would be happy with a DX that used wi-fi or my own GSM/3G instead of the US-only cellular network. And the bright side is that it could probably be sold for less than the current versions.
The processor is not the expensive part, nor is the ram. The fucking display is the expensive part.
Still, the display has to be very expensive, since every other piece should be really cheap and there are not that many of them anyway. The Kindle has the brains of a cheap smartphone.
Look at all the other vendors of eInk devices. Those devices are also expensive. If they could massively undercut Amazon, they probably would.
And, of course, as long as market share is not a huge concern.
It is also unwise to enter a price war with a competitor with deeper pockets than you.
The Kindle DX has nearly 1-million 16 color pixels. That motorola phone has literally a handful of one-color pixels. Hence the price difference.
Its still a little cheaper than the iPod Touch was originally, isn't it?