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HP Reviving the $99 Touch Pad On December 11th
Frankie70 writes "Starting Sunday, December 11th at 6:00 p.m. Central time, 16GB and 32GB Touchpads will be available on HP's ebay store. A $79 accessory bundle will also be available, which includes a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard. The caveat with this deal is that these are refurbished TouchPads rather than the brand new models sold during the first firesale."
As a famous jerkwad once said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
I can't wait for them to start with the 7" tablet death march.
So, what do you think the actual chances of scoring one are? Geeze, this is gonna be a free for all
It's been discussed to death, but for that kind of price they really are a steal.
I think their initial intention was to throw WebOS and the TouchPad overboard, but consider that tablets are already racing to the bottom. HP's firesale pricing happens to already be there, and maybe a better strategy is to become a strong #2 in the market so they can upsell you to a more normally-priced $149 tablet next year. That would make more sense that just pulling the cord.
I already have an iPad2, and I also have the MS BUILD tablet (the thing with Windows 8 on it), but the low price is tempting. Should I get one?
I'm so tempted to get one of these as a toy. Also, they run Android REALLY WELL, apparently. So even if WebOS isn't to your liking they're still quite useful.
WTF, was that just a random xkcd?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
to the evolving low end consumer electronics market. You can try to sell these at a good margin and turn enough volume to make a fair profit, or you can go the walmart route and make a cheap product, and set your margins very low and make up the same bottom line in volume. Or maybe a smaller bottom line, but profit is profit. At the end of the year, if you clear a thousand or clear a few million, you're still ahead either way, and your effort was worth your while. Obviously it's better to clear millions, but any profit is profit.
Considering the amount of publicity alone they've gotten off this, HP may not have come out nearly as bad with their "tablet fire sale" as a lot of people are thinking they did.
And consider the post-sale baggage on most products - phone support, warranties, etc. By this being a fire-sale, they may escape a lot of the usual post-sale expenses of the other more normal product cycles. So we can't even really tell what the final outcome of this was for a few years to come. It may continue looking better months from now long after all the touchpads are sold.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Why does everyone feel the need to link to a XKCD comic when it is NOT related to the discussion / article?
http://xkcd.com/16/
I've read about this sale on 4 different sites toda and it isn't even noon yet.
I think it fair to say if it is getting this much publicity- no matter how hard I try- I will not have any success trying to get one.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Did they find more hidden in a closet somewhere?
hey!
"HP's ebay store" == HP's garage sale.
Maybe this is a good sign that HP's returning to their roots.
At least ebay has a chance of keeping up with the load, as opposed to HP's shopping site. oh, how embarrassing for a wannabe "services" company...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://xkcd.com/221/
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Where's my pepper spray?
For obvious reasons:
- The TP is rooted, sort of, so the OS is no longer an issue. If Cyanogen is working on it, do not bet against them. You will lose. And there is another team working on this.
- For the money, even stock, it's cool.
- Even a 90-day warranty should give you time to find out if it's a lemon.
- There will be a support community out there.
Now HP is right to toss these refurbs out for several reasons:
- Most of these came back from people too lazy or stupid to follow instructions and resolve their issue.
- If HP can't repair defective units, by whatever means, then all you TP owners have tablets that are just as dead as Elvis, it's only a matter of time. I'm trusting these were either repaired or reloaded.
- No point in keeping backstock of refurbs beyond the warranty needs.
- HP could be deciding that the end of the TP debacle is the day they have NO TPs available. Period. And the sooner the better.
So stop yer whinin' and get in line.
Oh, and all you crybabies out there with your sad tales of trying to buy one back when - I've heard all the complaints. All par for the course. Bad things happen during these closeouts, and resellers are often either morons or thieves. Caveat Emptor. Same as it ever was.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I've purchased dozens of refurbished consumer electronics, and I know other people who have as well, nearly all of those devices are still working just fine months and years beyond their warranty expiration. I've seen maybe 5-10% failure rate on refurbs, which is about the same as my record with "brand new" consumer electronics. YMMV, IANAL, KTHXBYE
Perhaps an important point - the HP eBay store only ships within the US via UPS. So even if all you wanted was the accessory kit, if you're outside the US, you're SOL.
Those outside the US will just have to bid on them after arbitrage.
And the site's open to HP employees on the 11th. General public is on Monday ,the 12th.
Only good part is it's 2 per customer.
Subject: Oblig XKCD
Why does everyone feel the need to link to a XKCD comic when it is NOT related to the discussion / article?
I think he already answered your question - Oblig is short for Obligatory: Required by a legal, moral, or other rule; compulsory
How could someone *not* post an obligatory XKCD link?
I know we like to hate everything on Slashdot, but it might help to include your specific grievance.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Nah, it's dumber than that. This guy's been spamming the same xkcd to what appears every story.
He should at least show enough initiative to write a bot to pick a xkcd relevant to the story. And then post the corresponding goatkcd (W:G).
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That is a the day which the giant Microsoft was awaken and launched IE.
mfwright@batnet.com
Most consumer electronics that are factory refurbished end up with completely new parts simply because the parts aren't repairable in the traditional sense. They whip in a new part and solder it in. So the refurbs are as good as the originals.
For 99 bucks its a deal. Even if its a non product at this point it will still do what it does now for a while.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
eBay at its quietest times probably handles an order of magnitude more traffic than HP's site at its busiest. If eBay could cope with the iPad and iPhone releases, I'm pretty sure it can handle HP's barrel-scraping.
Ebay melted under the load.
I signed in right before the sale started, and clicked "buy it now" as soon as they dropped the price. This took me to a sign-in screen again, and as after signing in again, the next page timed out.
After about 20 minutes of hitting reload to try to get the payment page to load, the listing was removed. Then I moved on to the 32GB version; when I tried to buy it, it would give me a database error every time I tried to buy one. If I hit refresh on the listing, I could see the number go up on the purchase history, so other people were buying them, it just wouldn't let me.
Finally, after about 45 minutes, I managed to get through to the check out, and went all the way through the checkout process with Paypal, only to have it tell me the item was no longer available on the last screen, after I'd already confirmed everything.
Now it doesn't even do anything when I click "buy it now" or "ad to cart."
Lame.
Did anyone get one of the tablets?
"Thank you for your purchase of HP TouchPad Wi-Fi 32GB Refurbished | FB359UAR#ABA. We are processing it to arrive as quickly as possible."
Yep; I managed to snag one while I was doing a bit of work in Photoshop. I can imagine that it might have been very frustrating were I not actually also occupying myself with something else while sitting in front of the computer.