Yesterday, we posted an article that estimated P1's price by using preliminary data from Alpha Top, the consumer portable's manufacturer. Since Alpha Top said it'd be making 200,000 units for a cost to Apple of $375 million, we surmised the cost to Apple per unit is $1875. However, at the end of the article, we cautioned that this is highly unlikely as a final price, as Apple is shooting for a much lower target price.

However, many of you wrote in with thoughts on why the initial cost is so high, according to Alpha Top. Most were along the lines of this submission:

I would imagine that there are a lot of production ramp-up costs included in that first $375 million and that Alpha probably doesn't hope to break even on the first 200,000 units, so the actual cost to Apple will probably be lower than $375 million/200,000.

Yes, this is certainly a possibility. This is a whole new product line, and we assume there are heavy product start-up costs involved with beginning production. However, this could not possibly account for that high a product cost.

On an amusing note, some people thought it may have been noted in Taiwanese currency, but that would give a cost to Apple of $80 dollars per unit, which is just a little bit off, though we'd love to see that price.

We think The Register got some bad info at some point in the chain from their sources at Alpha Top. Apple is heading for a very agressive price point, and we've confirmed there will be multiple configurations of the machine. We set our personal estimates of P1's price at $1299 for the base model, and $1599 for the high-end version.



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Written/Edited/Published by Doug B. Landry
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Coded on a Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3 Series from Baton Rouge, LA

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