I have an old SE. I'm considering upgrading to the new SE. The SE (which has already been out for months at $399) used to come with earpods and now doesn't, at the same price.
But the phones are clearly not the same and we have no idea what the real cost is yet. Just building a device this year, where transportation and shipping from country to country has been excessive, could account for that difference in cost minus the earpods.
> Everyone (to some approximation) has a charger already!
Yeah, but I could always use more for various places around the house, travel, one or more inevitably getting lost, etc. And haven’t they in the past few years started bundling better chargers than those lame 5W ones they used to bundle for the longest time? Wouldn’t mind getting one of those and ditching and old 5W one.
Then they should have dropped the price of the phone, no? At least, they should have bundled it in some way, considering that very few people probably have a USB-C brick designed for charging iPhones.
Why should they have dropped the price on the phone?
They are clearly stating what does and does not come in the box at the price. They clearly state the price. You either think what comes is worth it in the box or you don’t. They could exclude the power adapter while simultaneously increasing the price by $200 per unit. If people do not like it, they won’t buy it.
I don’t understand why there is this expectation that something is “owed” to the consumer market. If this was a bad decision on their part, and it drives a lot of consumers away from their products, it will show up in their sales numbers and they will course correct. Sort of how they did on their Mac keyboards.
My guess is that no one will care about the missing power adapter. I certainly don’t. If it increases their margin, good for them. If it is offsetting increased build expenses elsewhere, fine.
Also I would imagine $30 on a $700-$1000 device doesn’t really move the needle for most buyers. My sales taxes on that device will add up to more than that.
Because this is something they have done for many years and now they are claiming they're doing it for the environment when that is clearly not the full story. Arguments that bad decisions only show up in sales numbers are meaningless because consumer decisions do not occur in a vacuum, so pointing to sales numbers and trying to reverse engineer whether "this was a bad decision" doesn't work.
> Why should they have dropped the price on the phone?
Because price gouging is immoral.
If Apple was on the margins financially and needed to raise prices to stay in business, that would be one thing. Apple, however, is replete with surplus assets and is taking hard-earned money from other peoples' pockets simply because it can.
There are an awful lot of far more economically productive uses the proceeds of Apple's defacto price increase could be put towards instead of further enriching Apple senior management and shareholders.
That's not an equivalent issue. Employees, like consumers, need their money much more than employers (or more to the point, senior managers and shareholders) need it.
Wealth and income both have a decreasing marginal utility.[0]
The latest iPhone is not even remotely an essential item. 'Price gouging' as a concept does not apply, and you're watering down the term by trying to do that, which is dangerous.
You don't have to have an essential item to price gouge, though, you just need to charge more money than you otherwise would have to make extra profit. Whether the choice to remove the adapter in this iPhone was just for the profit margin can't be known for certain, but the fact that they removed it in other phones while keeping the price the same makes it seems like it was.
When you rise prices, you lose sales. When you drop prices, you gain sales. The market price is where a product of these two maximizes. You cannot make more profit by simply rising prices beyond the equilibrium point. That was economics 101 when I was taught it. Is that knowledge now deprecated? Or is iphone now an essential item?
I don't think the definition of price gauging is simply 'it's a bit more expensive than I think it should be compared to what it used to be for this optional luxury item' - if it is then it's a useless concept and we shouldn't worry about it!
> Then they should have dropped the price of the phone, no?
But it's a different phone with different components? Are you expecting that the price should otherwise be exactly the same? That's never what happens that's not a reasonable assumption.
> considering that very few people probably have a USB-C brick designed for charging iPhones
This is not a truthful statement. It can be charged by Lightning, which plugs into any USB-A charger. Anyone buying an iPhone has that.
The Lightning cable is Lightning->USB-C. So all the old USB-A chargers won't work...
Which means that people will through this cable in a drawer and use their old one (if it still works properly).
One reason I loved getting a new iPhone was getting a new cable, charger and headphones since my old one's were usually beat after 2-3 years. So this is a huge pain in the wallet, as well as inconvenient.
Did you watch the presentation? The new cables (if you buy an iPhone today) are Lightning at one end, and USB-C at the other. So you can't use them with your old adapter. This means a new iPhone buyer is getting a phone with no charger, and any of the old chargers they have won't be usable with this cable.
And cheap USB-A Lightning cables are crap. Even expensive ones from Anker are crap. Apple made ones are okay, but have poor strain relief, so eventually they crap out too.
Unplugging by pulling the cable (and not where you’re supposed to: the plug) stretches the silicone sheathe ever so slightly. Over time, that can cause the sheathe to rip. I’ve seen it many times and done it myself too.
I don't think all USB-A chargers are created equal. I know that if I plug my iPhone in with the official charging brick, it'll charge maybe in an hour or so. If I plug it into the USB outlet in my car ... I'm looking at much longer.
Some background on how Apple "detects" their own charging bricks:
Come on....
Everyone (to some approximation) has a charger already!
Why knock the people trying to reduce waste?