Apple's costliest iPad yet! Want it?

Apple has just announced their new 128GB iPad, memory space that you can probably bequeath to your kids. Oh wait, you can’t because of Apple’s policy. But hey, it’s still quite some storage. Now while you’re ooing and aaaing about the space, the smart ones have already taken out their calculator and are tapping away to figure out how much it’s going to dent their lifetime’s savings. So how much really?

Well, as some experts put it, in the American lingo, it costs just a steak dinner short of a full-blown Mac notebook.

Prices begin at $799 for the Wi-Fi only, or $929 for the version with 4G LTE connectivity. That’s $100 more than the 64GB model, which in turn is $100 more than the 32GB model, and that is $100 more than the 16GB iPad. A cool $300 from the basic model.

Well, the pricing is no surprise as Apple loyalists and others have been paying through their noses for an improved screen width and so on. But the timing is no accident.  NAND flash, which is what Apple uses in the iPad, costs far, far less than what it did a year ago, says IHS’ Andrew Rassweiler, which he pegs is currently around $0.55/GB and cost closer to $0.90/GB last year.

This means customers are spending $100 more for every $35.20 or so that Apple spends on an upgrade. And that’s on top of what people are already spending over the two other storage upgrades from the base model.