Local Store - Previous Gen. Pricing

[wfj5444]

Confirmed from our local store (Huntsville) and the Nashville, TN store:

No End of Life (EOL) pricing on 2009 Mac Pros. They are all to be shipped back.

 

[Cindori]

of course, shipped back, updated with 2010 efi, equipped with airport and bluetooth, then sold as 2010 machines 😉

 

[wfj5444]

Good point... Do all that slap in new HD and video card and you are good to go.

 

[dissolve]

My local store said this as well. He suggested keeping an eye on the clearance section.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Seems so odd Apple would do it this way. MPs are not cheap to ship back plus the cost to reprocess at the warehouse and then reship to customers, etc. I can't imagine any given store had a huge inventory they couldn't move either.

 

[eponym]

I'm hoping Carbon Computing (a local Apple reseller) puts together something worthwhile in the form of a sale.

They announced yesterday that something was starting tomorrow afternoon. I wonder if they were waiting for Apple to show their lower refurb prices...

 

[philipma1957]

I'm hoping Carbon Computing (a local Apple reseller) puts together something worthwhile in the form of a sale.

They announced yesterday that something was starting tomorrow afternoon. I wonder if they were waiting for Apple to show their lower refurb prices...

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/mac_pro


well here are the lowered prices lets see what they do. you should print or save this to use it to fight for a price.

 

[CaptainChunk]

Yawn.

I guess I was pretty lucky last year when I got my 2008 2.8 8-core with EOL pricing AND a business discount for $1899 ($900 off). I don't think we'll see a deal like that anymore but it's hard to imagine how they even made money at that price.

 

[deconstruct60]

Seems so odd Apple would do it this way. MPs are not cheap to ship back plus the cost to reprocess at the warehouse and then reship to customers, etc. I can't imagine any given store had a huge inventory they couldn't move either.

Not odd at all.

1. As pointed out nobody has huge inventory so the shipping costs are relatively small. Apple ships 10's of 1000 of packages every day. They get an affordable rate and if later sold (or swapped for a lemon) there is a profit margin on these limited set of boxes to soak up at least some of the "extra" one/two trips on through the shipping matrix. There is plenty of profit from the multiple orders of magnitudes ones that did get sold to cover the rest.


2. Helps maintain pricing stability. Apple likes prices fixed that don't move. They don't like folks sitting around for artificial selling event to be created so that folks move to buy something. Leaving "old" stock in stores that folks have to set firesale prices on to move can lead to race to the bottom pricing. Apple has billions in the bank... not going to be even a hiccup on the books to shave some margin off these to take them off the market. Think companies that buy back shares to keep stock price higher (especially after they floated lots of stock options onto the market).

3. Maintains a better relationship with the retailers. Because Apple is not forthcoming on when new stuff is coming in many cases. If they are going to spring new updates on retailers the least they can do is take the old stuff back. If given longer lead time perhaps retailer would have slowed up buys. (they do get clues but some stuff moves slower then others. This is a pretty low volume item for vast majority of stores so it is tricker for them to get this order flow right.) Sticking your "partners" with obsolete product is bad. It is already bad enough that Apple competes with them in increasingly more locations.

If there is some store that has disproportionately high number to ship back. Apple can go find out what the problem is. If they can't manage lean inventory management, might be time to cut them loose. If the Mac Pro has been collecting dust in a partners warehouse for a long time that isn't a good thing. Yeah Apple's inventory tracking could "know" this but if have to pay to ship back can bring bigger hammer to discussion table when trying to find out what problem is.


Finally, with the multiple week lead time between announce and ship there was a "dead zone" where retailers couldn't sell older stuff because many knew updates were just around corner. There was a 2-3 week 'Osborne Effect' here. Apple responsible for that. Apple should suck up the mop up costs.