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I'm wondering if Apple could pull off the continuous auction approach with new products? It would have worked like this for some period of time after the annou
by olefoo 17y ago
I'm wondering if Apple could pull off the continuous auction approach with new products?
It would have worked like this for some period of time after the announcement but before the official release dates Apple would sell you a numbered product at a multiple of the announced retail price, the earlier the date, the higher the multiple. So the very first iThingy would go for say $100,000 and the next batch might go for $50,000 each, and the third batch would be priced at $25,000 and so on. This would let them practice almost perfect price discrimination; most customers would pay what the product was worth to them...
There are of course very good reasons Apple does not do this.
- eru 17y agoWhat are the reasons in your opinion? I can see that it might give them a bad reputation, but that could be mitigated by parting with most of the profits for charity. Or are they trying to create an image of scarcity and desirability?
- olefoo 17y agoWhat happens if someone has a bad experience with a preproduction device that they paid 100x premium for? Once you factor in risks like that, selling a few models at an extreme markup doesn't seem quite as attractive.
- eru 17y agoOr I didn't want to talk about pre-production. I meant to talk about the begin of the normal production run, where demand for hyped devices (say: Wii, Nintendo DS, iPhone, iPad) far outstrips supply. By the way, it may be rational for companies to let this happen, since mass production facilities cost a lot of money to set up, and they have to aim at the longer term demand instead of the spike at the beginning.