Overall fact remains:
1. When Jobs mentioned the price on the mini you could have heard a pin drop in the convention center, if you listen carefully you hear someone front row say "huh" then a "tssk" sound.
2. By overwhelming majority almost nobody seems to like the price of the iPod, IF Apple listened to it's consumer base (rarely does, save a few instances) they'd please a huge audience AND sell these things like hotcakes at $199.
3. Only the most frothy Jobs follower Mac zany Koolaid drinker defends the $249, these same people would defend s*** tasting like ice cream if Jobs said it was like vanilla and put an Apple logo on it.
4. I heard from a couple sources the mark-up on the current iPod ranges from upper twenty percent low end to almost fifty percent high end.
5. If, for argument's sake, Apple's mark-up on the current iPod is, say, 30 percent, lowering the price to $199 without finding a way to make them cheaper would make a mightly slim profit margin, a profit margin to be sure, but slim. Apple ain't about slim profit margin, even in the face of that helping get more people buying Macs, they simply do not care, they care about profits, like it or not (that and innovating for the entire industry). That's why they are billions in the black while all but a few others are in the red or barely hanging on.
What I'm trying to say is YES Apple would be smart to lower the price to $199 but NO knowing Apple and their history of stuff there's no way in heck they will for a very long time to come, EVEN if they don't sell (which initially they will do okay).
