Did you just buy an iPad? Good. Now have a look at the price of the accessories Apple is selling for it.
$79 for the Cheapest Apple Pencil? Cheapest Magic Keyboard for $249? Apple Needs to Rethink iPad Accessory Pricing
In my opinion, the iPad is the most useful device in Apple’s entire product lineup. It does most of the things you can do on a phone, a good chunk of what you can do on your laptop, and it’s extremely portable.
You can just carry an iPad around and do each and every single thing throughout the day. You can’t say that about a phone or a laptop. Definitely, the experience is not going to be perfect, but you can remedy that with accessories.
The iPad suddenly becomes more useful when you start adding accessories to it. The Apple Pencil is a great starting point, or the Magic Keyboard. But, the prices these accessories command are unreal.
If you just bought the latest iPad Air and you’re looking to buy the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard for it, you’ll be spending $129 and $299, respectively. That’s more than $399 for accessories, that too for the 11-inch model.
Sure, you can save some money by going for the USB-C Apple Pencil, but it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
You pay almost the same money as the 10th-generation iPad itself when you just buy the Apple Pencil and the official Magic Keyboard Folio for it. That’s $79 for the cheapest Pencil and $249 for the keyboard.
I understand there are plenty of third-party alternatives out there, but they’re just not the same in terms of usability and experience. It’s time we accept that.
Apple delivers the full experience through its own accessories only, not outside it. Give that Magic Mouse a scroll, experience the butteriness and then realize you can’t find it anywhere else at all.
Even if you buy a third-party Apple Pencil clone, it’s just bad. You don’t get the precision the Apple Pencil gives you while doing things like sketching. That pressure-sensitivity and tilt gesture immediately takes your work to the next level.
Third-party styluses basically imitate the touch of a finger, nothing else.
When it comes to using the Magic Keyboard on iPad, you won’t find the same experience anywhere else either. Sure, plenty of clones exist once again, but one swipe at the Apple-made trackpad and all you’ll do is convince yourself forcefully that the third-party one is the same thing.
It’s clearly not.
Keeping official accessories so expensive for iPad is really depriving it from its true potential. Think about it, when you start to piece together the iPad Air or iPad Pro with official accessories, you do come up with a ‘laptop,’ but it is a far worse one than the real thing such as a MacBook Air.
A worse computer should be cheaper to put together, not expensive.
Again, the iPad will never be the best laptop, but having to turn it into one using the best possible way available costs too much money.
I am not going to suggest a new price point, but I completely disagree with the current one. If Apple can figure out a way to deliver the iPad hardware to people at such a competitive price, then it can do so for the accessories as well.
Do you agree?
