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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

The rip off level pricing on storage and the obvious, purposeful omission of a card slot is one thing that really turns me off from buying an iPad or iPhone.

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Yet they still manage to make the iPad cheaper than every other tablet out there. Weird, huh?

Really? There are some decent Android options in the $300 range, e.g.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/24/archos-70-and-101-interne...

From the article: " Yes, we can all agree that the displays are seriously cruddy and the overall build quality and design, for lack of a better work, suck, but at this point we've just come to expect that for a tablet under $300. "

Definitions of decent vary.

"Yes, we can all agree that the displays are seriously cruddy and the overall build quality and design, for lack of a better work, suck, but at this point we've just come to expect that for a tablet under $300."

That looks like trash compared to the iPad. We've seen in the market so far that building a tablet that is remotely close to iPad in terms of hardware build, let alone software, costs more.

The $250 Nook Color has solid build quality and is trivial to root and turn into a full Android tablet.

And a refurbed iPad 1 is $349 from Apple, $399 new, as long as they last. Presumably, they're still making a profit.

Not 'weird'. That is unrelated and dependent upon other factors.

I'm not referring solely to the iPad. Apple charges an extra $100 for 16GB of flash storage for iPhones and iPods. That's not market rate.

The whole idea of pricing storage like that came from the iPod, and I think by the time you have devices that are used for general computing like iPads, it's time to drop it. I would prefer to have a card slot.

(By the way, for people who may be downvoting my earlier comment because they think I'm some crazed anti-Apple partisan, I do own a MacBook Pro and an iPod. A client is also buying me an iPad 2 for completing a project, so... that's just my opinion about the storage pricing).

I would prefer to have a card slot

I am not sure whether I would want one. Having one would introduce a lot of opportunities, but also would remove lots of ease of use. Install an app => user must select where to install it. User interface-wise, what would happen to the home screen if I take out a card with some applications on it? What if I plug in another card? What if that card contains an application that already is on the built-in flash? Will this support separating executable from user settings? Etc.

The best solution for this I know of is the one Microsoft chose for their phones: no built-in flash, and the card slot is in a place where it cannot be removed without shutting down the hardware. However, I am not sure that solution adds sufficient value to the device to warrant its downsides (some compartment door that makes the device slightly larger, and that likely makes the device look a little bit less nice)

I have a palm pilot that used an SD slot and I thought they handled that very well. When you installed an app it installed to main memory. You could move it to the SD if you wanted to. And when you ejected the sd, the icons for the apps that were on the SD card on the home screen disappeared. They came back when you put the card back in.

I'm not saying I want that back, but I am saying that I thought it was a pretty nice easy way of making that work.

Windows Mobile 6.x behaves in the same way.

Motorola handles the card setup the same way (it's behind the battery).

I'm confident that Apple could figure out how to do this right. You're not?

"What if I plug in another card?"

I think the autorun.inf standard could serve as a model.

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