alt Hacker Newsfrom a financial perspective they would assume one persons data is worth maybe 50$ a year (a random number) on top of maybe another 50$ in subscriptions they can sell. Assuming most such products service the business for up to 3 years, you are looking at an additional 300$ upfront that the business loses giving the data away to someone like Apple. Also the value gain from purely having such a business of subscriptions and data collection is probably another 100$ per customer. Thats close to 500$ for that thing.
Someone like Casio could just sell it for 500$ and collect their future cashflows right away. However, the customer turnout might be significantly less than 55$ they are selling it for.
So the only way to sell it for profit is to keep the data and make a subscription (which may or may not exist yet for Casio).
They could just sell it at an honest price with an honest profit. It’s an upsell from cheap F91Ws so they could have made more money just by selling me a thing that reads from Apple Health. It doesn’t even need to track steps itself.
I also disagree my email address and step data is worth $450 to them.
Let’s be honest. This thing is not innovative. It’s going to be using cheap commodity chips. Its selling point is nostalgia. I find it hard to believe it’s not already profitable at $55.