Good thing Apple charges a premium price for iPad. This launch has to be EXPENSIVE!

[Agent OrangeZ]

Think about it...

Using overnight shipping in a lot of cases... and iPad has free shipping.

Having special trucks for them to keep iPads locked away.

Specific orders to parcel carriers to only deliver on a specific day.

Rumors of special warehouses for packaging and storage of iPad orders.

All of the man power involved to make this go as smooth as possible with no leaks.

 

[MovieCutter]

When your margins are what Apple's are...you can afford it.

 

[camfunction]

I imagine they get a huge discount on shipping fees due to the sheer volume of product that they ship each year.

 

[urkel]

You know how kids used to run outside to chase down the ice cream truck? That's the feeling people get when they hear that distinct FedEx truck engine stop in front of the house.

FedEx benefits more from serving Apple than the other way around.

 

[jarednt1]

Apple outsources this all to Ingram Micro. They are responsible for retail distribution, warehouse space, online order fulfillment.

 

[Macman45]

I imagine they get a huge discount on shipping fees due to the sheer volume of product that they ship each year.

Precisely...Apple has HUGE discount pull with UPS / FED EX etc...Shipping they don't worry about.

The cost of manufacture, a bone of some contention here, is a major factor too. The profit margins are huge...They are not going to suffer...

 

[jsalicru]

Precisely...Apple has HUGE discount pull with UPS / FED EX etc...Shipping they don't worry about.

The cost of manufacture, a bone of some contention here, is a major factor too. The profit margins are huge...They are not going to suffer...

This is very true. The company I work for ships packages to/from home office/location 1x per week. That's over 1600 overnight packages a week. This doesn't count anything else that they might do for higher ups and regional offices, or special packages, etc.

When I try to ship something company related using our house account, it costs me less to priority overnight a shipment than it does to send it ground.

 

[jarednt1]

Precisely...Apple has HUGE discount pull with UPS / FED EX etc...Shipping they don't worry about.

The cost of manufacture, a bone of some contention here, is a major factor too. The profit margins are huge...They are not going to suffer...

Margins are probably even better, as its done through Ingram Micro. Who handles distribution for many other companies.

 

[JUiCEJamie]

Most companies in the UK pay a courier service a fee per year, as opposed to a fee per unit.
A huge contracted payment (probably in the multi-millions) from Apple will benefit FedEx/UPS so much, that it'd be silly not too take on the work.

 

[monkeylui]

How is it a premium price? I don't get this. Everyone says it but it's competitively priced to other similar tablets. $499 base price. C'mon. That's cheap.

 

[Vindicator]

How is it a premium price? I don't get this. Everyone says it but it's competitively priced to other similar tablets. $499 base price. C'mon. That's cheap.

I think it is even cheaper compared to other competitors, like the new Asus Transformer 700 with 1920x1200 screen start at $600

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

Shipping is built into the price & trucks "belong" to the shipping co. It's standard warehouse practice for shippers to leave their trailers @ the warehouse then send a rig to p/u trailer when full.

But bottom line is that it's not costing Apple anything off it's margin. We pay it in the iPad price, it's just invisible.