3G hardware is NO WHERE NEAR $130. Anyone that thinks it is doesn't have a clue.
You can purchase 3G enabled phones overseas for the equivalent of $10 pretty much anywhere.
Yes, a premium USB 3G stick will cost you $100 from Bestbuy.
But guess what, bestbuy gets a $20-30 cut off of that price. The wholesaler who sold the product to bestbuy gets another $10 or so off of the price. The manufacturers gets another $20-30 dollars off of the price. The packaging costs, the shipping costs, the marketing costs for the USB sticks all that takes up the most of the rest of the costs. The actual 3G antenna itself costs a few dollars at most.
The fact is, apple would be buying 3G antennas in bulk, millions of them directly from the factory, which means they would be getting them for probably less than a dollar each. The royalties might cost another dollar or so. To apple, a 3G iPad costs them no more than $4 more compared to an otherwise similarly equipped iPad.
This is why 3G phones with those antennas inside them can be bought in Asia for $10.
There is one reason and only one reason Apple is charging $130 for the 3G upgrade, because they want to milk the high end users with massive amounts of disposable income.
Apple will only be making a $200 or so off of off each $499 iPad sold. This is no where near the profit margin Apple gets off of many of their other products. Apple probably gets close to a thousand dollars in profit for each $2000 Macbook Pro sold. Competing laptops will identical hardware sells for well under a $1000 (hell, I just picked up today a
i5 processor laptop, with a hdmi port, a bluray player/drive and dvd burner, 4 Gigs of DDR ram, built in sd card reader, USB ports, wifi N, a dedicated graphics card, a 15.6 inch high res screen, a built-in webcam and a 320GB HDD (basically everything that people wanted the iPad to have and a crap ton more) for $499 from Best Buy) so saying that Apple only makes a $1000 off of each $2000 Macbook Pro they sell with far cheaper hardware inside is probably a significant low ball.
Given that, the margins of a $200 they get from the $499 iPad is chump change. So how they make more margins? They offer a premium 3G version of the iPad for people with large amounts of disposable income who can afford another $30 per month for 3G data on top of what they already pay for 3G on their cellphone and mark that up by $130, and they offer a premium 64 gb version and mark that up another $200. Then a few months from now, they'll release a iPad Pro version with usb ports, a webcam, an sd reader, a hdmi out, double the ram to 512 mbs and charge $1500 for it, though it costs them no more than a few dollars to manufacture over a standard $499 iPad. And all the high end users who already bought the $829 iPad will throw those out and upgrade to the $1500 iPad.
That's just how business works, makes the most money you possibly can, charge as much as you possibly can for your products, and mark up every upgrade as much as you can no matter how cheap it is for you to implement.
