
Apple Abandons the Mass Market, as the iPhone Turns Luxury - PretzelFisch
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-abandons-mass-market-as-iphone-turns-luxury/
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skybrian
I'm wondering if part of this is Apple adapting to people keeping phones
longer? The cost is spread out over more years. Also, refurbished iPhones may
be the new low end, and why not?

I don't use iPhones, but the MacBook I bought last year was refurbished and
I'm quite happy with it.

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joezydeco
Refurbished iPhones are the best deal running.

Apple has already said every refurb gets a new battery and case. And if they
replace any glass breakage, there's really nothing left besides the logic
board. You're essentially getting a brand new unit.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-refurbished-used-iphones-
new...](https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-refurbished-used-iphones-new-battery/)

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veli_joza
Good for them. They manage to increase revenue without increasing production,
and they refuse to be evaluated based on production numbers. Still, 46 million
devices just in the last quarter? And investors want it increased?

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mtgx
Apple is moving "upmarket." It will be interesting to see if their fans'
intense loyalty towards the company's products will win over this classic
"innovator's dilemma" mistake that Apple is making.

I for one thought Apple was going down a wrong path the moment they started
implying they wanted to make super-expensive (compared to their costs and
features) "fashion" products instead of continuing to make "premium tech
products", which I define as tech products using high-quality materials (and
as such more expensive by default than the average product) that may or may
not have "healthy margins", too (as opposed to the "outrageous margins" that
most luxury/fashion products have).

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woah
Most laptops have been in the luxury market for forever! (Judging by your
definition of $1000+ as luxury)

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binarysaurus
Disagree. The median laptop price is <$1k and it's not a fair comparison by
any metric.

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appleiigs
Apple is so big, I don’t know why they can’t be mass market and luxury at the
same time. Toyota:Lexus, VW:Audi:Porsche.

It’s never been so easy to switch ecosystems. Trying to milk the apple cult is
a quarterly earnings trap. Lacks vision.

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megaman8
it's simply too expensive to be selling to the masses. Apple knows where and
who the money is, and it's not with the masses.

besides, Apple actually has plenty of low end offerings on sale alredy: the
iphone 6 and iphone 5. the refurbished versions of their older phones the 4,5
and 6. Right? are those selling out?

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gitgud
Not sure a $1000 phone was ever _mass market_ , I always thought they were
luxury smart phones...

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Arnt
Once upon a time, $1000 was the price of _two_ iphones. That $500 wasn't
cheap, you could get many, many Nokia 5501s for the money, but a doubling is a
doubling.

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EpicBlackCrayon
Maybe I'm a little young and naive, but it seems as if the disparity between
what you paid in dollars versus what you got as an "experience" has never been
greater than now I think. "Experiences" are always sort of an subjective
measurement, but back in the day you could reasonably argue that the value
proposition of the Mac and Apple's ecosystem as a whole was worth the premium.
Think back to just after the iPhone's launch in 07-08. Vista was crap, XP was
riddled with malware and viruses, and there wasn't really a competent software
and hardware solution that "just worked". In comes Apple with the beautiful
unibody MacBook Pros and OS X 10.5, two absolutely solid pieces of engineering
that just kept getting better with Snow Leopard and on. You had Apple come out
of left-field and start machining consumer electronics out of aerospace grade
metals, and a stable OS with features like Time Machine and AirDrop that are
true delighters. Microsoft gets out Windows 7 (also a solid piece of software
engineering in 2009), but then you get this wave of absolutely awful hardware
in the form of craptop netbooks with Atom processors that can barely handle
having a tab of IE open, maybe two in Chrome (this is before Chrome was a
bloated mess and you needed ad-blocking on every site). On the desktop side
you've got people likely going down to Wal-Mart and buying a top of the line
(read crap) E-machines desktop. All of that terrible hardware would bring down
even a software experience as seamless as Windows 7. Sure I'm paying $600 for
my E-Machines desktop versus the $1200 iMac, but when I want three tabs of
Chrome open, who's got the edge? (No pun intended.) An E-Machines desktop with
(sounds good on paper, but performs like shit IRL because the Bulldozer
architecture) an AMD 6-core CPU and 2GB of RAM or the Mac with a Core I series
processor and software and hardware that is tuned to work as a cohesive unit?

Now the desktop and laptop market have matured and so have PC OEMs. I think
this started with Dell and their excellent XPS laptop in 2012(spurred by the
introduction of the MBA ironically.) Microsoft's attempts at software have
matured as well with Windows 7 and (arguably) Windows 10. Factoring all that
in, it just doesn't make sense to pay a premium anymore, unless you consider
the cult of personality and luxury brand that Apple is. I think this is most
evident in the smartphone market. Android used to be the kind of OS in which
you'd be sitting a red light, fumbling to get directions out of Google Maps,
and then the app would crash or the phone would reboot (but you need to know
NOW if you need to take a turn at this street or whatever). That's by and
large not the case anymore. Android has generally gotten more stable and cheap
OEMs are pushing out half decent experiences on low end hardware. You can
pretty much do everything on a $200 Android phone that you can on the $1000
iPhone. Now, things are certainly going to be a bit bumpier on the cheap
Android phone, but bumpy enough to justify an $800 price jump to an iPhone?
Most people would say no. Its the same for Chromebooks and the like. Again,
the only thing that changes this equation is the social status effect that
comes with owning an Apple product (or any luxury product.)

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esotericn
Consider that people - en masse - are willing to spend tens of thousands of
dollars on cars that they spend far less time in.

$1000 for a phone is both expensive (compared to cheaper models) and trivial
(compared to other budget items).

The interesting thing isn't why people buy an iPhone over an Android phone.

The interesting thing is why people spend huge amounts of money on luxuries
when they have less than 6 months in the emergency fund.

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watertom
Mass market, talk about being out of touch. Considering Apple has about 12% of
the cell phone market they were already a luxury item. They are becoming an
ultra luxury item.

My wife ditched the iphone for a lower end Samsung, even my status symbol
focused teenage daughters can't justify the cost of an iphone, their old
iphones are being replaced by much cheaper Android phones.

