Under 4 Pound, Under $2000 Gbpi Challenge

[phrunt]

Nokta did it with the Legend, a cut price Equinox but with better quality by far, and proper waterproofing.  I'm not sure if the Axiom is better quality than the 6000 but it would not be a hard thing to achieve.  It's Minelab's lemon when it comes to quality.  There can't be many people left now that haven't had to send theirs in for something.

R&D costs aren't recouped on small amounts of sales easily, they need volume to get R&D back and that's what happens when you sell a detector at the right price, again you can look to the Legend, Nox 800 sales must have slowed down a lot over the time they were out, the Legend which is basically a better clone of the Nox came out and sells like hot cakes and you can bet the Legend was selling more units than the Nox 800 up until the Nox 900 release. 

Garrett may struggle to get their R&D costs back until they adjust their pricing on the Axiom.  They need it to be a detector people want to buy, if they came out with the Axiom at $3000 Australian dollars (about $2000 USD) they'd sell so many of the things to people that never even considered these higher priced detectors even in Australia which would be their toughest market to crack I would think.  If they did cheaper like $2000 AUD they'd be a massive hit, the casual detetorist that tend to just try buy a Gold Monster and hope for the best would be all over them. 

The Axioms not taken off as it should have simply because they didn't do what Nokta would have, and come in at a cheap price and grab a large part of the market Minelab miss out on due to their ridiculous pricing.

I just hope Garrett are testing the market trying to get Minelab sky high prices and come back to reality when they see they're very overpriced.

[Steve Herschbach]

11 hours ago, Gold Catcher said:

One thing to consider is R&D cost that will go into the selling price, so it's not just raw materials. But then again it is the level of innovation that matters. Just using old technology repackaged should not require much R&D efforts, hence the price should reflect that accordingly So, the question is do we expect a lot of innovation from a 2k PI machine? I sure hope so, but it might not be competitive performance wise to the "latest and greatest" that's out there. But that's not a reason to dismiss it, it would be a great option for folks on a tight budget who would otherwise remain stuck in the VLF world.

GC

The idea has never been to produce a cutting edge product, a GPZ 8000, for $2000. Yes, development costs are real, and must be recouped. I have always been thinking GPX 4500, which last sold for $2699. Dealers cried when Minelab discontinued it. Development costs long since recouped. All it needs is to be repacked in a modern housing using a modern battery option. I’d be thrilled with something like that and have never asked for more on this thread. Minelab can do this easily. Minelab discontinued the machine since, as a monopoly, it was undercutting sales of the $3999 GPX 5000. Solution? Discontinue 4500 so you have to buy the 5000. That’s what lack of competition gets you. The 4500 always was and still is Minelabs ace in the hole, that allows them to stop any threat by Nokta dead in its tracks. Maybe Nokta has figured this out?

Whatever, we will get there, and not too much longer. The fire of competition is doing its magic in VLF as I type. A match has been lit to PI and people like me will continue to fan the flame until somebody fills this massive hole in the detecting market.

[KD8GIS]

Price the product to "What the market will bear"...   A high enough price and the sales go down, But then again you need to build fewer (You're only gonna sell so many anyway) and you need fewer people to pay to build them. 

  Electric appliances at one time were very expensive.  A color TV in the early 70's cost a lot of money. Computers in 1980,  What did you get for your couple thousand dollars?  Now you get a whole lot more for the same money.  A metal detector (computer) R&D?  Sounds good,  As mentioned (Repackage) Put a (ALL PRO) sticker on it. "New and improved" You really don't need a better product, You just need to "Sell it".  Facebook, YouTube, Forums. 

 

[Jeff McClendon]

 I’m on Social Security with a little retirement fund and I work 2 part-time jobs. The last thing I needed was to pay over $4000 US for the GPX 6000. The lighter weight and the high sensitivity to a wide range of nugget sizes is what tempted me to do it.  I was disappointed in the GPX 6000 at first but now I guess I am happy with it. Have I found $4000 US worth of gold with it already…..nope.

Like many, I tried the less expensive Whites PIs and even had a go with the QED. They just aren’t the answer for me.

A GPX 4500 in a lightweight housing with lightweight battery sounds fantastic.

I would be just as happy with a PI that costs half as much as the GPX 6000 that would hit 0.1 gram nuggets a few inches deep along with deeper bigger sized gold, that weighs less than 4 lbs, uses current GPX 5000 and prior models Mono and DD coils and would double as a good relic and saltwater beach detector.

 

[jasong]

El Nino showed some pretty interesting tests with the ATX a while back with some good results to small nuggets. Minelab is Minelab and they do what they do. But I'm curious if there is a reason Garrett isn't doing exactly this revamped 4500 idea with their ATX package - updating it with a bit better performance/noise handling, better coils (or allow for NF/CT ML coils use), and throwing it in a better, lighter case, lighter batteries/shaft/etc and tossing it out for $1500 or something as a market shakeup - surely the ATX itself can't be making a ton of sales as is? Wasn't that Steve's original idea years back, or something similar? Is the ATX too close in performance to the Axiom if it were updated?

A lot of tech disrupting companies price their products at losses to gain market share, with the idea that the short term losses will be outweighed by the long term gain in customers. Not saying either company should sell at a loss, but it seems like the detecting world is not taking advantage of some aggressive and/or strategic marketing tactics that could be employed. Maybe it's just not worth it in a decreasing market like gold detectors where the long term is in question?

[KD8GIS]

 The cost to a tool may exceed the actual build cost, and more than a fair profit.   People have asked me how much my detector costs.  When I say I have over a $1,000 invested (In the one) they are wondering why I'd spend that much.  Yes I know it's a lot BUT,  (My Rational)  What I can do with the tool makes it worth it. All my detectors have paid for themselves many times over. (So I pay)   I know this goes against my line of thinking/commenting on their high costs of detectors.  They can charge because we "Rationalize".   Marketing "The dreams"  sells Detectors, Computers, Cars, Phones. 

 I'm retired and on a limited income, coming up on 69 years old, Yesterday I did over four hours of hiking, Miles, That in itself makes a detector worth it. Who "SELLS" the Dreams best? 

  

[Steve Herschbach]

On 6/13/2023 at 8:19 PM, jasong said:

El Nino showed some pretty interesting tests with the ATX a while back with some good results to small nuggets. Minelab is Minelab and they do what they do. But I'm curious if there is a reason Garrett isn't doing exactly this revamped 4500 idea with their ATX package - updating it with a bit better performance/noise handling, better coils (or allow for NF/CT ML coils use), and throwing it in a better, lighter case, lighter batteries/shaft/etc and tossing it out for $1500 or something as a market shakeup - surely the ATX itself can't be making a ton of sales as is? Wasn't that Steve's original idea years back, or something similar? Is the ATX too close in performance to the Axiom if it were updated?

The Axiom is an updated ATX, with everything you described except a lower price.

[Steve Herschbach]

Here we are August and no word at all on the “in the works” Nokta PI or the Fisher Impulse Gold. I’d say we can pretty well write 2023 off as having any possibility of a new PI that one can actually lay hands on. Maybe by end of year we might see something announced for next year?

Minelab historically alternates between coin detector releases and gold detector releases. 2023 was the year of the Manticore, Equinox 900, and Xterra Pro. A full year indeed for them. I expect that we will see something new in the gold nugget area in 2024 or 2025 latest. This could be the long awaited GPZ 8000 but I also wonder if Minelab might be cooking something up to head Nokta and Fisher off at the pass. They could easily rework the GPX 5000 into something more compact and simplified. Think GPX 5000 stuffed into an Axiom package, with simplified timing presets. Do that with GPX 5000 coil compatibility and the right price, and they have a winner. I’d buy one just to tap into that vast set of existing coils. Pure speculation on my part, but if they are paying attention to a possible Nokta PI or Impulse Gold release it would be smart to have an answer waiting in the wings, and Minelab is not dumb.

If not, then surely Nokta or Fisher will do something, so I’m cautiously positive about something coming in 2024.

 

[phrunt]

They can't discontinue the 5000 as it's still the best they make at some tasks, some ground only a 5000 will do so renewing it really makes sense.  The 5000 can be used in many places, with AI coils it's still the best with EMI I think, it works well at beaches, heavy hot rock areas, super bad soil, extreme salt, places that kill the 6000 the 5000 works perfectly fine.  It's also their only offering with some discrimination, although not perfect it does work especially for coin and relic hunters.

Over the years I'm sure they now know ways to tweak it further, simplify its settings a lot and lighten it up.  I fear they'd go the chipped coil route with it through and prevent us using existing GPX coils, a fatal mistake of course but I'd not put it past them.   Doing that is going to bite them one day though as if the competitors don't do it, and gradually catch up or even get close, or just outright destroy them with price then the availability of aftermarket coils will be a really attractive option for buyers.  I'm sure a large percentage of 5000 owners barely strayed into settings beyond their go-to's.  Simplifying the settings with a digital screen interface wouldn't be that hard for Minelab.  

If Nokta can do so they should tap into that existing GPX coil compatibility on their PI, QED did it, it can be done and gives it an instant boost over anything else that comes out from other players, plenty of people have coils and they're readily available with reasonable pricing, the coils available are vast and fantastic options.  It would be a very attractive attribute to their PI.

Hopefully next year we see something from Nokta and Fisher.

I think we are far more likely to see a revised Gold Monster with Multi-IQ than we are a GPZ 8000 in the near future.  The coil offerings now available for the 7000 make the 8000 a whole lot harder to do than they planned.

[phrunt]

I don't even see anything new in the current pipeline, this is from a Conference in May 2023.

Metal detectors are decreasing becoming a much smaller part of their business, from averaging over 70% now down to 35%, a massive drop and just shows how the African market was really propping them up, they even say they were dependant on Africa.

Hopefully Minelab are thinking of a re-release of a 5000 as a 5500 to stay ahead of the competition, but if they are they're not giving anything away to investors about it, normally new products being worked on get some sort of mention, this time it's all about opening up new markets such as India and getting rid of dealers relying on e-commerce and selling direct to customers.