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HP Touch Pad Still Popular ... With HP Employees
Earl The Squirrel joins the army of Slashdot submitters, with a story that dampens my hopes to get one of the last (cheap) HP Touch Pads. He writes: "Today HP made available to their employees (via their EPP store) one last batch of HP Touch Pads. The response has been so overwhelming that if you go to the HP store right now, you'll get the 'Please try again later' page. HP employees have 'slashdotted' their own store."
...specially considering how HP is being managed these days!
Played with iOS and Android more than a little. The winner for best interface goes to WebOS, by a landslide. I didn't expect to like my Touchpad this much, but it's just leaps and bounds ahead of my Android and iOS stuff...
Damnit, HP. Why must everything you touch turn to crap?
Does anyone think HP employees of all people haven't seen them consistently selling for $250-$300 on eBay? Who in their right mind wouldn't try to buy as many as they're allowed and triple their money?
That might be why the term is in quotes.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
HP employees probably wanna make as much cash on the side as they can now, knowing their impending unemployment.
Um, HP? Remember me? The guy that paid you $131.95 at 3am on August 21st? Yeah, haven't received my TouchPad yet and you haven't refunded my money. Every day you update it with a new ship date and delivery date, now it says Sept 27th ship date.
How can you be selling these to your employees when you haven't even shipped the ones you still owe your customers?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
>>>HP Touch Pad Still Popular ... With HP Employees
Or they just know they can turn them for a profit.
HP had just priced it out of the market.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This just proved that those devices would go like bread and butter if sold from that price point. A manager needs to be stupid not to realize this kind of proof of concept.
Read radical news here
They charged what it costs plus a modest margin. Sometimes you're not pricing something wrong, it's just that there just isn't a rational price which makes for an easy sale.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It seems like webOS is going to die an undeserved death. It was conceived by a company too small to survive and came late into the game, and it will be killed by a company too stupid to know what it has and what to do with it.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
christ has this term turned into something stupid like 'photoshopped' ?
Yes
"The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic."
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Still haven't seen it. till have the open and unfulfilled order :(
I don't know about that. They priced it the same as the iPad, and then when it wasn't selling dropped it $100. I dare say, if they released it at $100 less it would have sold better, since the perception after the price drop was that no one willing to buy it.
Most people I know don't even know what the touchpad is/was. I would honestly say HP didn't so a very good job marketing this thing, because it was just a whole lot of *shrugs shoulders*. Most people didn't even know what the Pre was, or that Palm was even a player in the market for the past 5 years. Tech saavy people know what's up, but the other 95% of the population never put much thought into palm post early-2000's. Palm's pre-Pre devices (no oun intended) were pretty much for the power user set.
It's too bad, really. The touchpas I thought was a great device.
why it shouldnt turn into a term like that.
Read radical news here
HP had just priced it out of the market.
Maybe... but I can't help thinking that more people would buy a $700 tablet for $99 than would have just brought it for $99
Bingo. "They charged what it cost plus a modest margin" makes the huge leap of faith that Apple is also making a "modest margin".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And if they priced it for free it would've sold ever faster! Then it would have been a huge financial success!
That model actually could've worked if HP had a substantial subscription service or similar to make up the difference after the sale, like Apple does with the iPhone/iPad, but they didn't so they had to actually turn the profit on the device to make up for even the cost of research and development.
of your comment in the subject line the "WTF effect"?
which is totally what she said
posting annonymously as an EDS'er who was press-ganged by HP
Take orders for 1.25 million @ $99
Only have 250K in stock.
profit!
I like microcars
1. Sold a cheap TouchPad
2. Played off the synergy of its desktops, phones, and TouchPads. It was cool how you could send a link from your Pre to a TouchPad just by touching the two.
3. Profit!
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Apple locked most of the component suppliers into low-price contracts. Apple can get deals by buying 20 million screens/batteries/custom ARM CPUs/Gorilla Glass covers that you just can't get when you're buying 2 million. It's the same problem that Motorola and Samsung have with their tablets ending up more expensive than Apples
I'm sure I'm not the only South African who read the first part of the headline and wondered briefly why /. was commenting on the the SA vs Samoa match in the rugby world cup tomorrow ...
There is a fairly good analysis posted over in comments over on metafilter.
Basically, HP has always sold these blood-of-the-innocent printers for cultists who worship Cthulhu or whatever, but like all printer companies, they made the cartridges hard to refill. As you can imagine, that's a much larger problem for a cultist who needs the sacrifice dying right there.
HP has tried to profit form this for years by sending employees out as 'sacrificial printing geniuses', but they needed an awful lot of employees doing this, because so many rituals must occur on the same nights.
Now, you've got almost all HP employees in one Great Old One's cult or another. So obviously the HP employees rushed out to buy the first tablet that offered blood-of-the-innocent based display technology.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I was one of the lucky few who got one of the $99 HP Touchpads in the store. And, as an iPad owner, I have to say... My iPad was gathering dust. I originally bought the iPad because I was sold on the apps. It seemed like there were so many and I could do anything! But it didn't take long to realize that doing any kind of involved work on a touchpad was slow and awkward. And soon I was just using my laptop for any of that. All I used the iPad for was web browsing, and watching video. Enter the Touchpad. For browsing the web? A superiour experience, as not only do I have flash, but I quite like the webOS cards for handling multiple browser windows. For viewing media? I have a homebuilt PVR that I use to record tv shows. They are recorded in a format supported by the Touchpad. So how much effort is involved in transfering my TV shows to the Touchpad? I just plug it in, the Touchpad shows up like a USB drive, and I transfer files. Compare that to having to run iTunes and open files and synch... The Touchpad is just so much more convenient. You can argue specs, you can argue "The iPad has apps!" But as an item filling a niche between laptops and smart phones and finding myself with access to both, I'm reaching for the Touchpad much more than I'm reaching for my iPad.
TL;DR I never would've checked out the HP Touchpad except for the price. But now that I have, it has already displaced my iPad as a better product for my needs.
From RSS, i loved that the ad for this /. post is for iPad cases :-)
No. Apple's making a nice margin on the iPad. But they can also make them more cheaply than HP can make Playbooks, because they have huge volume and have stitched up agreements with component manufacturers.
I don't think that $100 would've made a big difference. There are already $400 tablets, they're not much more of a success. The fervour with which people clamoured for a sub-$200 touchpad shouldn't be taken as a general indicator that any price cut would've made it a success. I think that wouldn't have kicked in until well beyond the break-even point for HP.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"They charged what it costs plus a modest margin"
which in no way disproves his point. Even if you sell it at cost, if it's past the consumer price point, it's been priced out of the market.
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And HP doesn't have a channel? please. You have NOTHING to base that statement on.
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Let's get this straight. Their own employees managed to slashdot their own servers? That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in their plans to go to a mainly service-based business, does it?
I don't know why, but I am really surprised how many comments there are here along the line of "HP really should start making them again and sell them for $99 - they'd certainly be successful!". How can anyone not be aware the devices cost substantially more than that to produce?
I bet Porsche would sell a lot more cars too - if they'd price them at $1000.
#DeleteChrome
Are you really pretending to have seen none of the stories in the tech and mainstream press discussing how Apple has leveraged their huge supply of cash to get bulk component pricing agreements that no other manufacturer can match?
According to Google, HP Touchpad costs $306 to make while the iPad costs $260. Of course it's all approximate, but at $499 it's clear they're being sold with about a $150 - $200 margin, which is pretty hefty in the consumer electronics market.
Now it's speculated that Amazon is taking a $50 loss on each Kindle Fire. And you know what, they're going to sell a ton. A quote from my friend just now: "dunno why i want the kindle fire so much." I'll tell you why, because it's in impulse buy range. And if Amazon can make that $50 back in content sales then they're going to do well with these.
...
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
HP employees probably wanna make as much cash on the side as they can now, knowing their impending unemployment.
Maybe Meg will give them good feedback for their résumés.
A+++ worker, would hire again.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
These are supposed to be utility devices that sit between your phone and laptop/PC. Who wants to pay laptop prices for a tool (that you might not use much) besides Apple zealots? Rather than pimping out $500 pads with more features, they need to figure out how to par the manufacturing demands down to $99-$149 dollar devices and let the consumers get a taste for them. That obviously makes them more appealing to the general public.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well, it is just about the same size as the first iPad. I got a Griffin folio-style case designed for the iPad 1 for $5 from Verizon. It's a perfect fit for the Touchpad.
sudo eat my shorts
I bet 95% of the people who are buying them as HP employees are only doing to in order to sell them on ebay in an attempt to make money off them. Which generally I am ok with, who am I to stop someone from making money. I do have an issue with that when there are still normal customers who have not received something they ordered (month(s)?) ago.
I take it you don't read Slashdot regularly. Apple buys insane quantities of flash for the iPods, iPhones, iPads, and now for laptops as well. They pay, in advance, for the entire production run from a factory for some period of time. The often even pay for some of the build costs of the factory. This gets them huge discounts. I don't know what they're paying now, but when the iPod Nano came out Apple was paying about half as much for flash as everyone else.
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And at this rate, I fully expect an email reneging on my purchase based on some bullshit excuse. This will probably end in tears and useless class-action lawsuits.
Lol, you think Meg wrote her own resume, cute.
At a higher price. They should see the Touchpad version 1 as the promotional for the second version of the Touchpad. There are so many people who have purchased Touchpads now that there is now a market for WebOS apps unlike earlier.. and also there are enough people who have used Touchpads to know that HP can make a very decent tablet.
I can't help thinking that more people would buy a $700 tablet for $99 than would have just brought it for $99
That is a really good point. I think a certain amount of the frenzy for the TouchPad was the fact that people felt like they were getting a deal.
Riiiight. Because HP doesn't have any leverage with component makers, because they don't make any other hardware than the TouchPad. Other than being the largest computer maker in the world. Sure buddy, no leverage whatever.
The single weekend that it was on sale at only some Staples stores for $300, it sold great. They should have sold it at around cost for the first generation to build up a userbase (and with it a developer base) so they could reasonably charge that nice margin on the 2nd/3rd generation.
ever heard of 'economies of scale' ? if there is this huge demand at this price point, by producing for that demand, you will get your costs much lower due to mass production on economies of scale.
Lol, you think Meg wrote her own resume, cute.
Whoosh!
Then there's Asus Transformer, which started selling for $399 (it can be had for $370 on Amazon now) - $100 below iPad. And clearly Asus wasn't selling that at a loss, since, unlike Amazon, they couldn't expect to recoup the losses by selling other goods and services through the device.
You seem to believe that research, software, shipping and marketing cost nothing.
OK