What does it cost to make a Kindle?

[thewayne]

About 52% of the price that Amazon charges, with over 40% of that being the display.

I have no problem with Amazon making a decent profit on it, they have R&D costs to recover and to pay for developing the Kindle 3, etc. What I do have a problem with is the amount of money they are paying to Sprint to subsidize the cellular connection that it requires. I would be perfectly happy with a unit that required a WiFi or BlueTooth or USB connection (or memory card, for that matter) to transfer books to it if they would bring the price down to under $200. Unless I become a road warrior, there is no way I'd pay $360 for one of these puppies, regardless of how cool it is.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090421_430707.htm

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/1935202&art_pos=17

Comments

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

For me, I didn't want a phone for a PDA, so going with a Smartphone wasn't practical. Though considering the size of my Dell, the Smartphone might not be significantly larger.

[silveradept]

Yeah. Smartphone was not what I wanted, especially because it required the data plan to be useful. I'm not paying for a data plan to use a phone as a mostly-offline external memory module.