With flash memory being as cheap as chips nowadays why is there such a big jump in cost between tablets with say 16, 32 and 64GB?

I presume that what you get in a brand name tablet is better quality than your average cheapie SD card but still seems expensive.

Just thinking that if Google had stuck say 64 or 128GB in the Nexus 7 it would have been awesome

They put the massive price hike between the different memory modules because people are prepared to pay the extra

Yeah I suspect mainly market forces.
It’s what people are prepared to pay.

A decent Sandisk branded Class 10 64GB SDXC card can be had for £48.

http://m.mymemory.co.uk/product?p=40917

I think you’ll find that the flash memory used in pads and phones is a different type to that used in removable cards.
Which is why it takes a longer time for the memory in devices to increase in capacity because it’s more expensive in the first place.
I could be wrong, but I’m sure I read that somewhere a while back.
[edit] those SDXC cards have only just come down to that price; a couple of months ago they were £75, and before that £119, and eighteen months or so ago £650…

its nand memory which isn’t quite the same.

still i read that the price apple pays for an extra 32gb for the 64gb model from the 32gb model if you follow me is $33ish. Quite far off the £79 difference that they charge.

Not just the flash, but other components (eg 3G,4G etc.) as well.

My understanding was that the difference in total production cost of the cheapest and most expensive tablet in a range was minimal. Single-digit £’s or thereabouts. Think apple were effectively charging 25x the price of a 3G chipset to have 3G chipset soldered in. I’m sure HTC, Samsung, Kindle are probably similar markups.

Yeah I suspect mainly market forces.
It’s what people are prepared to pay.

so basically that ^^

I think you’ll find that the flash memory used in pads and phones is a different type to that used in removable cards.

You might have something there…my cheap Android tablet can be a little sluggish and I suspect its because the main storage is called SD card – i.e. I think the onboard storage is just an SD card inside the device, which presumably is much slower than the onboard memory.

I suppose it’s like the difference in cars, you can buy a boggo LX version of a Mondeo for say £21,000 or a top of the range Titanium X for nearer £30,000. I bet the base costs between the vehicles will only in reality be a few hundred pounds but the manufacturers all know we like our shiny toys and are prepared to pay extra for them!

Spooky – nope, it’s just convention. If you have an SD car installed it appears as a sub folder inside the sdcard one.

In general, on something like a Nexus 7 with no card reader the SD card folder is just a virtual link to the storage partition on the internal memory. There are many reasons for doing his; some of them good!