Many news outlets picked up the article written by the British 'tech tabloid' about P1's cost to Alpha Top, the Taiwanese firm Apple has hired to produce the 'consumer portable' due at MacWorld New York. They plan to produce 200,000 units of the machine by the end of 1999 at a cost to Alpha Top of $375 million dollars. If you do simple math, you see that the cost to Apple for each P1 is $1875 dollars, much higher than several estimates out there.

Then you have to tack on Apple's margin for the machine, and it could easily be sold for an easy $1999, if The Register's sources are correct. This is not at all unreasonable, as we're now told that Apple is shipping P1 with an TFT active matrix screen, which adds a lot of cost to the machine.

As you recall, Apple itself produced and shipped 800,000 iMacs between its release on August 15th and Steve Jobs' report on January 5th at MacWorld San Francisco. Only 200,000 P1s seems actually on the low side to us, given the built-up demand for the machine.

Lastly, we caution that the final price of P1 simply cannot be determined at this time. In fact, we'd be surprised if the price was not revealed even at the P1's introduction at MacWorld New York, since that will probably be up to a month before its ship date. The data the Register is reporting might be a preliminary calculation. Sources assure us Apple is shooting for a price lower than 1800 dollars. They have set a budget, then they buy the best components for the machine as possible within that budget at the time of production.

Written/Edited/Published by Doug B. Landry
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©1998 Doug B. Landry. All rights reserved. All or part may not be reproduced or distributed without prior consent.
Coded on a Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3 Series from Baton Rouge, LA