Never going to leave you. NEVER.
The End-of-Lifed HP TouchPad has proven to be insanely popular. So much so that it turns out HP will be re-starting production for a limited run.
The really crazy bit is that if they price these at the existing firesale price of $99 for a 16 GB TouchPad, then HP loses close to$200 a system. That’s not counting the possible costs of restarting a production line they may have already repurposed.
HP has long been a company that lives by the “Gillette Effect”. This term refers to the fact that Gillette could stop making razors today, only sell refills, and remain profitable. Now, it looks like HP has the same scenario with their printers and ink for the last decade or so. Should we be looking for something like that for webOS? Only time will tell.
Wow! Any hint as to when this run will be available? Nicely played by them. They’ve probably been planning this all along. I can’t imagine it so easy to just spin up the equipment to make a few more touchpads.
All they’re saying right now is that it’ll be by the end of October 2011, probably in September.
Regardless, it’s probably not a complete factory re-tooling. Knowing what i do about Six-Sigma(admittedly not much), it’s probably like what happened to the Delorian. The factory in Belfast shipped all parts to South Texas, and there’s a company that renews Delorians for like $25k, with production parts that never were used. They(HP) probably have thousands of leftover parts, and the firesale demand shows that there’s enough loyalty to actually be economically responsible and not destroy the hardware and write it off as a business expense(as other companies do; huge mounds of electronics, destroyed because it has to be legit “on the books”). I can see HP selling them for like $150/$200, so as not to take too much of a hit. They might have hooked us in with $100/$150, they can now afford to sweat a bit less, and charge us a bit more. Who’d pay $80 for Sylvania or a Chinese A-Pad, when you can have an actual name brand for not much more?