Many people will cynically presume no doubt that Apple just want to take more of their hard-earned money, through a slightly underhand way. Assuming that a reasonable proportion of their customers (roughly 120 million of them!) will view a wall-charger as necessary, there is bound to be a sizeable amount of demand for their official chargers. And, at £25.00, or $29.00, a pop, with minimal transportation and production costs, one can be confident that there are financial incentives at play in terms of the choice to disregard the iPod charger.
Furthermore, an iPod charger will incur costs for production, especially through additional costs for transportation, as the neat and minimalistic case within which new iPods are sold would need to be expanded, thereby reducing the number of units that could be crammed into shipments, hence in the long-run, perhaps leading to significant increases in transportation costs. No doubt these extra costs created by the inclusion of a charger would need to be passed onto the consumer. Which would in turn, following the law of demand, cause a decrease in sales, which would be more pronounced if demand were elastic, and obviously less so if it was inelastic, i.e. less responsive to a change in prices. Therefore, increasing the price of the iPod so that it includes the charger will probably put more people off buying than it will encourage them to do so.
Perhaps price-targeting is at play here to. For some people, price will be a much bigger determinant as to whether or not they purchase the iPod or not than for some others, so these people are more known to be 'price-sensitive'. Through keeping prices at a minimum, those who are price-sensitive should still buy the iPod, hence meaning that Apple minimises the number of lost customers it acquires. However, surely Apple want to charge people who are willing to pay more, more money than those price-sensitive ones, right? Well, it is for these people that the price of a wall-charger is so inflated. As they are willing to pay for it, let them. And that is a further tactic that Apple employ to pull that extra disposable cash from those more affluent pockets.
If the above reasons aren't adequate, there will almost certainly be a strong positive correlation between iPod-computer connections, and App Store purchases, for when people connect their iPod to their computer, it will increase their likelihood of browsing the App Store, and grabbing that latest 'must have' app.
Surely, for Apple it's obvious - make iPod's cheap, chargers expensive, and ... it's happy days.
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