How about making customers happy? How about making a personal gift more personal?
I call this baseless speculation.
It's not like you are forced to have engraving. If you want to resell it, don't engrave it. If you want the person at the receiving end of a gift card to be able to reuse the card, don't sign on the card.
More like, they already laser etch the back of the iPod. Why, not take a small step further to differentiate your product and make customers feel even more attached to their purchase? And the reason they charged for it before was not to offset the cost of an extra step in production, but to monetize something that the customers want.
I call this baseless speculation.
It's not like you are forced to have engraving. If you want to resell it, don't engrave it. If you want the person at the receiving end of a gift card to be able to reuse the card, don't sign on the card.