I have a 10.5" 2017 iPad Pro and had a 2015 12.9" also. I also have smart keyboards for both machines and the (older) Apple pencil. To upgrade either machine, in addition to the iPad, I would have to get a new pencil and smart keyboard, so I decided to get the 2017 12.9" machine on eBay -- don't have to get a new keyboard or pencil, and thus can get the near equivalent of a 2018 12.9" iPad for 1/2 or 1/3 the price. I looked at the new iPad Pro's in the apple store, but it just doesn't seem to me that it's worth paying so much for very incremental improvements that will not actually make any difference for me. No doubt Apple makes mostly good products, but why do they make us pay so much (about $300 in this case) to replace accessories that we already have?
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Why spend so much for 2018 iPad Pro
- Thread starter glhiii
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They found out many will just pay their high prices,if everyone started doing as you Apple would lower their prices.
But sadly many just keep paying what Apple asks.
At first I was interested in replacing my current 10.5 but now that I looked at the ridiculous resale prices of this iPad and all my current accessories, plus the 32% increase in all these new Pros, the increasing exchange rates and import fees in my country, then I discovered I no longer can sustain this fetish. Honestly the improvements can’t justify losing money and having to spend a lot of cash.
Either Apple lowers these prices and improve hardware and iOS in a meaningful way, such as better battery or perhaps a 4K screen, or I am done with them. My 10.5 serves me right.
The first thing I disagree strongly is how storage is so pathetic expensive for Apple. We have now a few TB hard drives that cost a lot less than a 512 GB or 1 TB iPad, a G Drive with 10 TB is worth 400 $. You can’t even buy a 256 GB iPad which is the minimum these days with 4K content, for less than 1K. Get real. If this scam does not harm them financially, I’ll say the iSheeple will always be duped no matter what.
Either Apple lowers these prices and improve hardware and iOS in a meaningful way, such as better battery or perhaps a 4K screen, or I am done with them. My 10.5 serves me right.
The first thing I disagree strongly is how storage is so pathetic expensive for Apple. We have now a few TB hard drives that cost a lot less than a 512 GB or 1 TB iPad, a G Drive with 10 TB is worth 400 $. You can’t even buy a 256 GB iPad which is the minimum these days with 4K content, for less than 1K. Get real. If this scam does not harm them financially, I’ll say the iSheeple will always be duped no matter what.
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I went with the Mac because its a workhorse. Before I was working on a HP computer or something and it would crash midway while working on it for long hours.
You pay a little more because its a work horse, plus for the technical support whenever something goes wrong. I remember some of my friends telling how frustrated they were when they called Technical support for their PC. I forgot the brand, but they told me about all the calls they did just to get repaired. Oh and resell value is pretty sweet for an Apple product.
As for the iPad pricing...if you have a product that is in high demand you will set the price where you think is best. I've seen other tablets and they don't stand up to iPads. They are priced between $100-300. I thought about upgrading to the 2nd Gen iPad Pro. I would have to sell my current iPad first and lose about $300-400 just to get a few more inches in screen and a pencil that charges better.
I'm really hoping that Apple allows this 10.5 iPad Pro to stay in the Apple Ecosystem and allow it to be updated longer than the 1st gen Apple Watch (3yrs). This way you will get your monies worth. But something tells me that we will probably only get like 5yrs of support.
You pay a little more because its a work horse, plus for the technical support whenever something goes wrong. I remember some of my friends telling how frustrated they were when they called Technical support for their PC. I forgot the brand, but they told me about all the calls they did just to get repaired. Oh and resell value is pretty sweet for an Apple product.
As for the iPad pricing...if you have a product that is in high demand you will set the price where you think is best. I've seen other tablets and they don't stand up to iPads. They are priced between $100-300. I thought about upgrading to the 2nd Gen iPad Pro. I would have to sell my current iPad first and lose about $300-400 just to get a few more inches in screen and a pencil that charges better.
I'm really hoping that Apple allows this 10.5 iPad Pro to stay in the Apple Ecosystem and allow it to be updated longer than the 1st gen Apple Watch (3yrs). This way you will get your monies worth. But something tells me that we will probably only get like 5yrs of support.
iPads in high demand? Since when? The number of units sold is in decline for the last 4 years. While I agree the alternatives might not be good that doesn’t justify these prices at all. Apple deliberately cripples these iPads and expect us to pay a lot for all these minor changes, every year.
There's plenty of reasons for increasing prices, though the top reason is that the product is desirable. The average consumer has access to monthly payment plans to hide the true cost of a device, but they can do that with any product and will look elsewhere if one product isn't desirable. The more well-off consumer can just buy any product they want, so really they, too, are making their decision based on how desirable a product is.
Mind you, a product can be desirable because it brings something new to the table either in the entire industry or simply within a particular manufacturer's lineup; because it is more of what the customer already feels comfortable with; or simply because it works well with what they already have or use. The first type is served by allowing a level of frustration for something new to build up for a couple of years, then releasing something really nice (Touch ID, Face ID, new physical design, etc) - this is usually the case when some customers also feel frustrated with having to "buy new versions of stuff they already own". It's a calculated risk on Apple's part, banking heavily on the desirability of their products. The second type is served by small and steady updates to the software that usually keep things familiar enough from one year to the next (annual iOS updates, refinements to Apple's apps and services). The third type is served by making sure the products are intended to work together and by leveraging what customers already own (iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library, iMessage in the iCloud, App Store, products with the Lightning connector, etc).
With both types of customer prices can gradually be pushed higher, although for different reasons, and when that happens they need to be pushed higher across the board so as to maintain a more or less "sane" parity across different device categories. If only iPhones got more expensive, for instance, at some point their value proposition would start feeling weird compared to iPads and Macs. That's one reason why only iPhones can do regular phone calls - it's a big part of their value proposition. That's why the Apple Pencil only works with iPads. They have a niche that's not going to be filled by any other Apple product, so if you want to do those things in the Apple ecosystem you need to get the products to match, even if they cost more this year than they did last. Likewise if iPads did exactly what Macs do and were also iPads, they'd have to cost more than Macs for them to make sense to Apple as a product - and maybe we're slowly getting there.
Apple plays the long game and as such it's in Apple's interest to allow its customers to acclimate to a certain price expectation for any given product type they sell. If one year they sold a sub-1000 dollar iPad with iOS apps and the next year announced a 2000+ dollar iPad -like device that was able to run both iOS and macOS applications the majority of their iPad customers would be shocked. Their expectations of what an iPad can do for them would still be mostly based on what their previous iPad did (plus a few of those incremental improvements or the occasional brand new thing), and the sudden jump in the price they expected to pay for a certain iPad hardware configuration would in no way match with that - what's more, they might not see the added value of support for macOS apps. So it only makes sense for Apple to gradually increase the price of a product if they expect that two, three, five years down the road that product will do more than it does today. For them today's price needs to be a step below the price demanded by tomorrow's features. For their customers the price hike needs to be tied to something new that can be used to explain it today. Hence the iPads Pro and iPhones X.
All of this requires that the product is desirable for the majority of the existing and potential customerbase. Sure, it's valuable to have superfans that act as ambassadors for a product, but those people are a minority just like people who own a product but still bash it. Apple knows there's always going to be someone who wants something Apple does not provide, or someone whose personal budget will not allow the purchase of a new Apple product this year. But there's always going to be next year, or the product two years from now, that'll make sense to upgrade to because the previous product will continue to serve well in the meanwhile.
That's why new versions of iOS consistently work with years-old devices. To make it possible for each customer to reach a level of cost-per-day they're comfortable with before spending again on a new product they find desirable in their own way, and don't feel the need to dismiss due to price. That's the long game.
Note that this is not a criticism of how Apple does business, it's just an observation. I'm in the fortunate position of being patient, not needing to upgrade every year, and being able to upgrade to what I want when I need to. I'm mostly concerned with things I have no control over, like whether I might be susceptible to PWM or not, and if I am, whether Apple will implement it better in future products or not.
Mind you, a product can be desirable because it brings something new to the table either in the entire industry or simply within a particular manufacturer's lineup; because it is more of what the customer already feels comfortable with; or simply because it works well with what they already have or use. The first type is served by allowing a level of frustration for something new to build up for a couple of years, then releasing something really nice (Touch ID, Face ID, new physical design, etc) - this is usually the case when some customers also feel frustrated with having to "buy new versions of stuff they already own". It's a calculated risk on Apple's part, banking heavily on the desirability of their products. The second type is served by small and steady updates to the software that usually keep things familiar enough from one year to the next (annual iOS updates, refinements to Apple's apps and services). The third type is served by making sure the products are intended to work together and by leveraging what customers already own (iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library, iMessage in the iCloud, App Store, products with the Lightning connector, etc).
With both types of customer prices can gradually be pushed higher, although for different reasons, and when that happens they need to be pushed higher across the board so as to maintain a more or less "sane" parity across different device categories. If only iPhones got more expensive, for instance, at some point their value proposition would start feeling weird compared to iPads and Macs. That's one reason why only iPhones can do regular phone calls - it's a big part of their value proposition. That's why the Apple Pencil only works with iPads. They have a niche that's not going to be filled by any other Apple product, so if you want to do those things in the Apple ecosystem you need to get the products to match, even if they cost more this year than they did last. Likewise if iPads did exactly what Macs do and were also iPads, they'd have to cost more than Macs for them to make sense to Apple as a product - and maybe we're slowly getting there.
Apple plays the long game and as such it's in Apple's interest to allow its customers to acclimate to a certain price expectation for any given product type they sell. If one year they sold a sub-1000 dollar iPad with iOS apps and the next year announced a 2000+ dollar iPad -like device that was able to run both iOS and macOS applications the majority of their iPad customers would be shocked. Their expectations of what an iPad can do for them would still be mostly based on what their previous iPad did (plus a few of those incremental improvements or the occasional brand new thing), and the sudden jump in the price they expected to pay for a certain iPad hardware configuration would in no way match with that - what's more, they might not see the added value of support for macOS apps. So it only makes sense for Apple to gradually increase the price of a product if they expect that two, three, five years down the road that product will do more than it does today. For them today's price needs to be a step below the price demanded by tomorrow's features. For their customers the price hike needs to be tied to something new that can be used to explain it today. Hence the iPads Pro and iPhones X.
All of this requires that the product is desirable for the majority of the existing and potential customerbase. Sure, it's valuable to have superfans that act as ambassadors for a product, but those people are a minority just like people who own a product but still bash it. Apple knows there's always going to be someone who wants something Apple does not provide, or someone whose personal budget will not allow the purchase of a new Apple product this year. But there's always going to be next year, or the product two years from now, that'll make sense to upgrade to because the previous product will continue to serve well in the meanwhile.
That's why new versions of iOS consistently work with years-old devices. To make it possible for each customer to reach a level of cost-per-day they're comfortable with before spending again on a new product they find desirable in their own way, and don't feel the need to dismiss due to price. That's the long game.
Note that this is not a criticism of how Apple does business, it's just an observation. I'm in the fortunate position of being patient, not needing to upgrade every year, and being able to upgrade to what I want when I need to. I'm mostly concerned with things I have no control over, like whether I might be susceptible to PWM or not, and if I am, whether Apple will implement it better in future products or not.
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Well well. Looks like somebody wanted to try out their new Smart Keyboard today
For me I decided it was worth it for several reasons. First, this iPad is my computer, it does everything I need it to do and it’s more fun and intuitive than a traditional computer. Secondly, although it is the most expensive iPad by far it’s still significantly cheaper than a Mac notebook (I need portability so an iMac or Mac mini won’t work for me). As for the accessories well I imagine they couldn’t get the design they wanted and leave the smart connector where it was. For me it’s not a huge deal, I don’t use the Smart Keyboard so I don’t need to pay for that and the pencil is improved in a lot of ways so I don’t mind paying for it agin (and truth be told I lost my old one so I needed a new pencil anyways).
[QUOTE="I looked at the new iPad Pro's in the apple store, but it just doesn't seem to me that it's worth paying so much for very incremental improvements that will not actually make any difference for me. [/QUOTE]
Totally agree and I know a few people sharing similar thoughts and opting out. I'd been planning to upgrade to no home button with an XR and 12.9 Pro this year but the new price points made me reassess everything and I got a lounge and dining suite instead. To my mind, the Macbook Pros seems like a better buy compared to similarly priced iPad Pros and I'll head in that direction when Touch ID is added. Lifting ASP to offset falling demand seems more likely to slow the upgrade cycle and slow demand further but sadly Apple seems intent on leaving money on the table.
Totally agree and I know a few people sharing similar thoughts and opting out. I'd been planning to upgrade to no home button with an XR and 12.9 Pro this year but the new price points made me reassess everything and I got a lounge and dining suite instead. To my mind, the Macbook Pros seems like a better buy compared to similarly priced iPad Pros and I'll head in that direction when Touch ID is added. Lifting ASP to offset falling demand seems more likely to slow the upgrade cycle and slow demand further but sadly Apple seems intent on leaving money on the table.
Perhaps its time to build them in the U.S. I would pay these crazy prices to American workers..You are paying for Chinese unfair trade practices right now...