The other day, Reagan was returning from a jog, and when she was closing the door to our apartment, she accidentally shut one of her Ipod earbuds in the door. Since then, she has been alternating between borrowing mine, and using her old ones (the kind that require the little foam part, to stay in [the foam part has been lost for ages]). I was looking online today, to buy her some new ones. Luckily, there is a store only a couple of blocks from my work, that carries them. They cost $29, which seems like a pretty reasonable price for some earbuds, right? That is until you look at the new 1GB Shuffle which is only $49, including earbuds and cradle. If the earbuds are $29, that means that the 1GB MP3 player (and cradle) are only $20. What? The MP3 player is cheaper than the earbuds? Is there an option to buy without earbuds? I’m sure that it is more complicated than it appears on its face. The production price of both the player and the earbuds probably fall closer to center, and the earbuds are probably in actuality a smaller part of the $49 Shuffle package. This leads me to wonder further, how much Apple is gouging. They are retailing the package for $49, the production price must be around $20 max, for the player and earbuds. I’m assuming that the raw materials for the shuffle (mostly the anodized aluminum case) are more expensive than the entire actual cost of production of the earbuds. So how much must it cost to make the earbuds? I’m guessing not more than $3. Then again, I could be way off. I tried to look it up. I didn’t find any production cost info on the earbuds. But I did find this article about the markup on the original Iphone.
$20 Ipod
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