There are lots of very expensive parts inside this high-end CD player
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)We've all read those blogs that "reveal" the parts cost of a fill-in-the-blank, Kindle, iPod, or Palm Pre. If you ask me, this simplistic, by-the-numbers gambit overlooks most of the costs of bringing a product to market.
First and foremost, products, all products, are priced to what the market will pay. I don't care if it's a 16-ounce bottle of Poland Spring water, Coldplay concert tickets, or a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, retail prices are determined by what the market will pay. And luxury products have higher profit margins than mass market stuff. Oh really?
But the mindless rash of blogs that purport to add up the parts costs, for example $39.51 for the display, $15.96 for 8 gigabytes of flash memory, $15.41 for components, and $12.39 for the 3-megapixel camera, to calculate the cost of anything are hugely misleading. The writer merely subtracts the parts cost from the retail price and concludes the difference is the "profit."
Does the writer assume the company's factory doesn't pay rent or for electricity or heating and air conditioning? And that the factory labor force works for free?
These articles completely ignore other costs, such as research and development and engineering expenses associated with creating say, a Kindle. Manufacturers also pay significant licensing fees for technology used in their products.
Shipping costs of large products such as flat-screen TVs must be factored in before determining the final cost to the consumer.
Oh, and what about the online or brick and mortar retailer? They have their own set of expenses for rent and employees. Some of whom might need health insurance.
... Read MoreLet's face it, iPod speakers are a cheap and cheerful group, but the market is about to get a boost of class, thanks to Parrot's Zikmu stereo iPod speakers ($1,500 a pair).
The striking design, created by Philippe Starck, stakes out a new approach to iPod speakers. Starck employs aerial curves and jet-black color, along with a generous helping of cutting edge technology to make the Zikmu an elegant lifestyle solution.
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
The Zikmu is iPhone- and iPod-dock compatible, and employs up-to-date Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies. The wireless stereo speakers need to be plugged into an AC power outlet.
The three-way, 2.5 foot tall speakers utilize flat-panel NXT tweeter and midrange panels that project 360-degree dispersion to create a room-filling sound. Each speaker is tri-amplified with a dedicated 10-watt amp for each midrange and tweeter panel, and a 30-watt amp for the woofer located in the bottom of the trumpet-shaped lower cabinet enclosure (that adds up to 100 watts total for the stereo pair of Zikmu speakers).
At yesterday's demonstration at a chic restaurant in New York City, the Zikmu's sound was overly reverberant. Stereo imaging was extremely vague, but I will grant that the speakers almost disappeared as sound sources. Bass was acceptably deep, but no threat to even small-powered subwoofers. The Zikmu is for buyers who believe it's more important for speakers to look good than sound good.
The Zikmu is due in April.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." --Albert Einstein
Oh goody, you can watch YouTube on your iPhone, but what if you just want a phone? I tried to buy a phone that's just a phone, and wound up with a Samsung SCH-u540. Is it just me or do you think it's odd that a phone comes with a 151 page User Manual?
Manufacturers load on features to sell product--whatever it is--phones, coffee makers, micro-wave ovens, or A/V receivers. Here's the deep, dark ugly truth: the features don't have to be useful, or even work as intended--their mere presence serves as a sales tool. Once the dealer moves another unit, it's mission accomplished time. I wouldn't mind, but features overload inevitably makes products harder to use, even when you try to avoid them. Do your eyes glaze over when you read stuff like, "superior zone control with additional zone remote unit and zone multi-language OSD" or "X Curve Compensator," mine do. Does anybody ever use these things? When I've called the companies' product designers for help they rarely know how to use them either. Feature Glut is getting out of hand.
Yeah, user manuals can be pretty scary
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)It's part of my job as an audio reviewer to evaluate the latest and greatest products, and I can't count how many times I've discovered really serious flaws in the implementation of feature sets, like the time an A/V receiver flat out refused to send any signal to my subwoofer. Funny, the receiver worked perfectly before I ran the auto setup, but afterwards my subwoofer stopped subwoofing. I reran the auto setup a few times before giving up, thinking I'd just dive into the manual speaker setup and turn the receiver's subwoofer output on again. Well, the geniuses that designed the receiver thwarted that move--once the auto setup was initiated--the manual setup menus were completely disabled. Or so it seemed, the brand's American importer was stymied, but after many calls and emails, the engineers back in Japan coughed up the secret factory reset codes, and my subwoofer was back in business. I'm a big shot reviewer, but what would the average customer do? Probably get good and frustrated dealing with the customer service idiots and live with it, or demand a refund.
Back in the stereo era a receiver was a simple thing. Hook up your turntable, cassette deck, a pair of big juicy speakers, and you were pretty much done. Nowadays there's so much more capability built into these things even tech savvy buyers sometimes struggle to play a movie or listen to the radio. You think I'm making this up? A couple of years ago a record producer friend of mine couldn't get any sound out of his home theater. He calls me whining "It worked fine yesterday, but I guess I pressed some button on the remote, and now I just have picture, but no sound." The guy's pretty smart, it's just that his home theater is just too damn complicated. I jumped on the subway, and when I arrived I found him reading a book, mumbling "This technology has never let me down." Turned out his A/V receiver was sending audio signals to Zone 2, but he didn't have any other "zone" but the room his system was in. There's got to be a better way.
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