Price competitiveness leads to race to the bottom. Outside of the 90s Apple whole brand has been the exact opposite of race to the bottom. Plus making a cheaper “good enough” device makes it much harder to justify also having the more expensive and profitable device.
But isn’t that the core of free market thought (the more conceptual variant, not the polemical variant). Thousands of companies fighting for every last minuscule hundredth of a percentage point of margin. Optimal intersection of supply and demand requiring both multiple competing producers and of course hundreds of millions of consumers.
My comment was somewhat glib, I admit. But I do think the framing in the article is interesting.
You can compete on more than just price. Apple focuses on quality and design. They also need to worry about running afoul of antitrust law. It’s better to have 50% of the phone market with high margins and no antitrust trouble than to try to capture more of the market with a cheaper device.
Corporate PR copytext (not only Apple) often includes lyrical polemical poetry about power of markets and so on (like how requiring USB-C charging is an attempt to subvert innovation).
And then you have price competition - arguably a fundamental element of markets.
So in my mind, I imagined the Apple executives speaking to each other in a overly posh Victorian accent:
What is this foul marxist-leninist price competition these smelly plebs are demanding? Since when did they decide they have a right to speak?
They don’t focus on quality that can be easily proved by multiple years of shipping devices with faulty keyboards for example.
They have an image of focusing on quality and whatever.
But isn’t that the core of free market thought (the more conceptual variant, not the polemical variant). Thousands of companies fighting for every last minuscule hundredth of a percentage point of margin. Optimal intersection of supply and demand requiring both multiple competing producers and of course hundreds of millions of consumers.
My comment was somewhat glib, I admit. But I do think the framing in the article is interesting.
You can compete on more than just price. Apple focuses on quality and design. They also need to worry about running afoul of antitrust law. It’s better to have 50% of the phone market with high margins and no antitrust trouble than to try to capture more of the market with a cheaper device.
This was just a glib, off-hand remark on my part.
Corporate PR copytext (not only Apple) often includes lyrical polemical poetry about power of markets and so on (like how requiring USB-C charging is an attempt to subvert innovation).
And then you have price competition - arguably a fundamental element of markets.
So in my mind, I imagined the Apple executives speaking to each other in a overly posh Victorian accent:
Nothing more and nothing less. 😆
They don’t focus on quality that can be easily proved by multiple years of shipping devices with faulty keyboards for example. They have an image of focusing on quality and whatever.