The 7" Blackberry PlayBook 16GB cost $499 when it went on sale in April of 2011. That's the same price as Apple was selling its 10" iPad 2 16GB for.
Five months later, RIM slashed the prices of the PlayBook. The 16GB model was sold for $199, $6 below the Bill of Materials costs.
RIM sold 700,000 PlayBooks before they lowered the prices, and even when they were selling them at a loss, they only managed to sell 1 million more.
Aside from its price point, it's not hard to see why the PlayBook flopped. When it launched, there were hardly any third party apps for PlayBook, the OS lacked autocorrection, the onscreen keyboard was barely usable, there was no integration with cloud storage, the default search engine was Bing, it had no store for media content, and of course: it had no standalone e-mail and calendar software.
Five months later, RIM slashed the prices of the PlayBook. The 16GB model was sold for $199, $6 below the Bill of Materials costs.
RIM sold 700,000 PlayBooks before they lowered the prices, and even when they were selling them at a loss, they only managed to sell 1 million more.
Aside from its price point, it's not hard to see why the PlayBook flopped. When it launched, there were hardly any third party apps for PlayBook, the OS lacked autocorrection, the onscreen keyboard was barely usable, there was no integration with cloud storage, the default search engine was Bing, it had no store for media content, and of course: it had no standalone e-mail and calendar software.