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March 11th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda The “Apple Tax” is the name tech pundits gave years ago, to the price premium you’d pay to buy a Mac over a PC. A number of people have tried to explain it by comparing Macs’ feature-for-feature, but the fact remains that aside from the Mac Mini, you can buy a generic PC for much cheaper than you can anything from Apple.
Not so in the tablet market, where Apple’s iPad dominates. Almost a year after the original iPad was released, we finally saw the first real competitor running the new tablet version of Android: The Motorola Xoom, which launched at $799 off-contract for the 3G version. Its base, Wi-Fi only model cost $599, the same as the iPad model with an equivalent amount of flash memory, but Motorola had nothing on the low end to compete with the $499 16 GB iPad.
Apple’s price advantages
One reason Apple has been able to price the iPad at $499 is because it’s foregone some of its usual “tax.” The iPad was priced aggressively (but profitably) from the start, leaving competitors struggling to keep up.
Another reason is because of Apple’s monopsony. As Peter Svensson of the Associated Press explains, it cuts deals with component suppliers, even signing two-year contracts worth billions of dollars. Apple was reported to have more cash on hand than the federal government last year, and can afford enormous bulk price discounts that its competitors can’t. It can even buy out the entire world’s supply of certain components, according to Philip Elmer-DeWitt of CNN Money.
Finally, its App Store and iTunes store make the iPad more desirable than other tablets, and create an effective lock-in where you can’t switch away from the iPad without losing all of your apps. Apple has been in the digital content business for years, while competitors like Samsung and Motorola have to let the inexperienced Google handle that side of things.
How tablet makers are competing
Motorola ended up discounting the Xoom as low as $299 refurbished, in order to somehow move unsold inventory. It wasn’t alone; the BlackBerry PlayBook, which debuted at $499 for a tablet half the size of the iPad, was repeatedly discounted to $199, and even given away for free to app developers. HP, meanwhile, bowed out of the tablet business altogether last year, selling off its remaining TouchPad tablets for as little as $99.
The two tablets that have actually sold in numbers anything like the iPad’s — the Barnes and Noble Nook and the Amazon Kindle Fire — have two things in common: They both cost $199, and they’re both sold by companies which run their own digital content stores. They’re also both half the size of the iPad, however, and most of the books that you buy through their stores can be read on the iPad via its apps.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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