Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Really? The iPod touch is $199. Cell radios really aren't that expensive.

The best estimates still only put production costs of an iPhone 3GS @ $178.96 1

The rumor isn't so crazy if you remember that google's most general mission is to get people online and using the web and looking at their ads.

You can guarantee that they know roughly how much ad revenue the average smart-phone using individual brings to them and therefore they could justify bringing a phone to market at cost or even below.

1 http://gigaom.com/2009/12/09/who-is-getting-rich-off-the-iph...

Best estimate, yes. But it's also the only public estimate.

Remember when Google announced that they were starting a free email service with a ridiculously large 1 gigabyte disk quota for everybody? They announced it on April 1, and everybody assumed it was a particularly implausible joke. How we laughed! And then it turned out to be real.

Keep your skepticism shields up, of course, but this sounds like it could happen.

Yet the iPhone costs more than twice that.

And the ADP1 (an unlocked G1) has relatively modest specs compared to this new phone and costs $400 from Google. I don't think that's because Google is trying to make a mint by sticking it to developers.

Virtually all new HTC smartphones retail in the $400-600 range. I don't think HTC is making a fortune off them.

Because apple is pretty greedy, and the iPhone has a camera.

Apple is setting a price that millions of people are willing to pay. I wouldn't call that greed.

What would you call greed, then?

Setting a price that's more than what your product is worth in the marketplace.

You can always spot real 'greed' because it's always self-defeating in the end.

Just because they're selling at market price, it doesn't mean that they're not greedy. If they were a bit less greedy, they'd rather have more users for a lower price, which in the long run can actually result in the same revenue. But then I'd get into the luxury brands theory/subject, but meh.

For a decent phone you need to add: radio subsystem, bluetooth, camera.

Along with these you get problems of heat dissipation, short battery life, long certification process with carriers around the world and god knows what.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com