mortslim;363598 Wrote: > > How about $150. for the Controller and $225. for the Receiver? Once > you get the price of the Controller down, the perceived value added > from the lower price (from the consumer's point of view) will hopefully > produce higher profits through a higher volume of sales, not a higher > mark up on each Controller sold. And more Controller sales will in > turn drive further sales of the other Slim Device products. And > lowering the price of the Controller would justify raising the price of > the Receiver. > Have you seen other technology products that have raised their price after introduction ?
It happens in Europe due to the currency exchange rates but besides that it's very hard to do and get acceptance. The Controller hardware has always felt expensive in comparison to the iPod Touch hardware to me. However, I think the idea is that most customers will buy the Duet and not a separate Controller and the Duet price is good. For people that just want the Controller, the iPod Touch is an attractive solution and in my opinion it will still be unless the Controller price is decreased to something like $150. A decrease like that is obviously not going to happen in the close future. When comparing the Controller and the iPod Touch solutions, you will have to realize: - The Controller is still more feature rich, it basically support almost all features available in SqueezeCenter. Besides this it also supports SqueezeNetwork. - The Controller has hard buttons which makes it easier to control in the dark than the iPod Touch, the Controller is also easier to control with a single hand than the iPod Touch. - The iPeng Skin version is close to the Controller regarding important features, but it still lacks the SqueezeNetwork support and the performance isn't as good as the Controller - The iPeng Native version still needs more features to be able to compete with the Controller as the single remote for your Squeezebox. It works really good already today for some people but it won't work for others depending on which features you need. The big advantage with the iPod Touch as I see it is that you also get a portable player. The Controller have audio playback support in 7.3 but it still lacks the physical format and local storage that makes it suitable to put in your pocket when you are leaving the house. In the long run I think the iPod Touch is going to win as a remote control for people that don't want the complete Duet package. However, today this is still not the case, many people need more features than what the iPod Touch native solutions currently offers or need better performance than what you get for the skin version. In the end all this might not be a bad situation for Logitech, because they are going to sell Squeezebox players independent if a user selects to control it with a Controller or a iPod Touch. A user that have a iPod Touch can buy a cheap Receiver to get a player for it, a user that doesn't have a iPod Touch can buy a Duet to get a cheap package with a graphical remote and a player. IMHO, the focus should be to make sure that a solution with AppleTV + Apple AirportExpress can't compete with a Squeezebox solution. To do this there are probably other things than the remote control that needs to be in focus. In this scenario its a pretty good idea to let third party developers handle the iPod Touch applications and skins and focus Logitech resources on other parts of the package. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info) 'My download page' (http://erland.isaksson.info/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.isaksson.info/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55543 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
