And just to sum up; these are the only ones offering this feature right? No eBay-knockoffs or cheaper alternatives?
This thing is worth, at most, $10 with shipping. The makers would still have a nice profit. Cheers for the people who took donated money and are trying to milk the most they can get for it.
MBA11 users would have to settle for this instead:
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruze...qid=1351701803&sr=8-6&keywords=sandisk+cruzer
For those who think this should cost $0.10, you clearly have never thought of, designed and manufactured a product before. How much do you think the mold for the plastic or programming cost for CNC'ing of the aluminum cost? $0.10?
As a designer and manufacturer of any product, coming up with a selling price of your product has to take into account up-front costs, materials, overhead, production as well as factoring in the value of your invention in the first place and the perceived acceptable price the market will bare.
I'm not sure why I'm mentioning this, because I really don't expect some people to understand regardless of the reality of the situation.
I'll order one of these in the next couple of months. I don't need the extra space now and I'm hoping they start offering higher capacity and faster micro sd cards soon.
Throw in some words like overhead, human management, synergy... Yeah that sounds good. Now it seems this piece of plastic is worth $35.
On a more realistic note perhaps the $35 seemed reasonable with their original estimate for order numbers, which was blown out of the water. By spreading those fixed costs over thousands of units they're a small part of the price now. Hell, they would probably make more if they sold them for $10-20 as it would increase their total revenue, with very little increase in cost (mostly fixed costs as you noted).
But this is a mac product, so why not overcharge?
Aren't they selling directly to the consumers, and not through retail at this point?So, when you go to buy an ice cream cone, do you tell the ice cream shop that because the cost to produce the ice cream in such huge volumes drives down the cost, they should sell you a cone for $0.10 (because it only costs $0.05 per serving)?
The beauty of a free market is any company can produce and sell a product for whatever the market will bare. I'm guessing, but could be wrong, that part of the pricing strategy also includes factoring in distributors and retailers into the mix. So take the $35 and factor in a 65% margin for the retailer. That brings down the cost to $12.25 and beyond that the manufacturer needs to factor in discounts, extended payment terms, warehousing allowances as well as an additional 25% discount to cover a distributor margin into the price. So the real selling price in volume to retailers could be $9 or less.
Further, even if they under calculated what the real uptake would be, it's still going to be a fairly low number because they're only going to get a small percentage of mac users to buy, overall, so the real numbers they see profit wise may be small (relatively speaking).
I would say either save up and upgrade your SSD to higher capacity or get a USB 3.0 1TB drive.
Doing this is paying money to get a little more space but sucky performance.