15C LE - What the heck is a fair price?

[Michael de Estrada]

(05-10-2018 02:25 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(05-10-2018 01:32 PM)Michael de Estrada Wrote:  Er, HP did exactly the opposite IMO. They certainly did not profit by selling the HP 15c LE at a modest fixed price, while restricting the total production quantity. All they did was enable profiteers like Samson cables to scalp them on the secondary market. When I bought mine, I fully intended to use them around the house or on the road in place of my precious vintage HP 15c, until I realized how unusable the keyboards are with the constant repeating. So, now they mostly sit unused in their fancy presentation boxes in a closet, while my DM 15L takes their place. So, if I decide to sell any of them, I will just list them in an eBay auction and get whatever the market decides to pay.

I'm fairly sure HP made some profit selling these, it's unlikely they did it solely to please a few aficionados and enable profiteers. While they could have built them with top-quality keyboards, they instead opted for lower-cost production, giving them higher margin. And by positioning them as 'Limited Edition' they ensured rapid sales of the complete lot, without the normal high advertising and channel sell-through costs.

In sum, it seems pretty capitalist to me... but ymmv....

Any profit that HP may have made was probably insignificant relative to overall sales. My guess is that they make more money daily on the sale of printer ink. I don’t think they even thought about profiteering, and just did this to satisfy a few aficionados within the company and the tifosi who signed the petition to bring back the HP 15c. The same lame marketting types within HP that came up with the unreadable keyboard color scheme on the Prime were probably also responsible for the whole presentation box and collector concept for the HP 15c LE.