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This is the same argument people have been making about the desktop Apple products for years, and they were wrong then too. Apple is aiming at the luxury market

by shib71 16y ago

This is the same argument people have been making about the desktop Apple products for years, and they were wrong then too. Apple is aiming at the luxury market and seems content to ignore the rest of the market. What Apple should worry about is that "good enough" is getting very, very close to Apple's "premium".

orenmazor 16y ago
I came in here to post exactly what you said. I know plenty of apple users what will pay the premium for a wide variety of users. that said, this is about AT&T's doom, not apple's. as far as apple cares, buy their phones outright and use them any way you'd like.
- cheald 16y ago
  It's very much in Apple's interest to have users tethered to a 2-year contract with an upgrade option. It's a lot harder to upgrade people to the latest and greatest when they have to shell out $600 every 18 months for a new model.
  - orenmazor 16y ago
    maybe so, but I was pretty shocked at how many people went unlocked with the iphone 4 (it's sold unlocked in canada).
cheald 16y ago
I think the real danger here to Apple is that due to devices like this, Android could decisively unseat the iPhone as "the smartphone" in the public consciousness. Right now, when you say "smartphone with apps", I suspect that most people will mentally jump to the iPhone. If these sorts of low-end, low-cost device/plan packages go big (and they will), it'll rapidly erode the iPhone's carefully-curated image as "the smartphone platform". Android has been chipping away at it for a while now, but if you capture the low-income-but-tired-of-the-RAZR market (hi, high school and college market), then you more or less have captured the entire direction of the market. Apple will continue to sell iPhones, and will continue to be successful at it, but it won't be the market-dominating behemoth it's been in the past couple of years.
- lsc 16y ago
  >but if you capture the low-income-but-tired-of-the-RAZR market (hi, high school and college market), then you more or less have captured the entire direction of the market. See, apple tried that. when I was school in the 90s, apple owned the (primary school) campus computer lab market... and really, nothing else. As far as I can tell, it didn't help them much at all, other than to get a generation of people thinking of apple as slow, obsolete crap (which is as much a result of the school district keeping them around too long as anything else.) edit: On the other hand, come to think of it, OS-x started getting real popular around the time most people my age started earning enough money to pay for a mac, so maybe I'm wrong and the policy was a resounding success? (I mean, I was born in '80, and as I've had a 'real job' since '97 or so because I skipped college to play in the .com boom, I sometimes forget that most people don't start earning money until their mid 20s.)

by shib71 16y ago

orenmazor 16y ago

I came in here to post exactly what you said. I know plenty of apple users what will pay the premium for a wide variety of users. that said, this is about AT&T's doom, not apple's. as far as apple cares, buy their phones outright and use them any way you'd like.

cheald 16y ago
It's very much in Apple's interest to have users tethered to a 2-year contract with an upgrade option. It's a lot harder to upgrade people to the latest and greatest when they have to shell out $600 every 18 months for a new model.
- orenmazor 16y ago
  maybe so, but I was pretty shocked at how many people went unlocked with the iphone 4 (it's sold unlocked in canada).

cheald 16y ago

I think the real danger here to Apple is that due to devices like this, Android could decisively unseat the iPhone as "the smartphone" in the public consciousness. Right now, when you say "smartphone with apps", I suspect that most people will mentally jump to the iPhone. If these sorts of low-end, low-cost device/plan packages go big (and they will), it'll rapidly erode the iPhone's carefully-curated image as "the smartphone platform". Android has been chipping away at it for a while now, but if you capture the low-income-but-tired-of-the-RAZR market (hi, high school and college market), then you more or less have captured the entire direction of the market. Apple will continue to sell iPhones, and will continue to be successful at it, but it won't be the market-dominating behemoth it's been in the past couple of years.

lsc 16y ago
>but if you capture the low-income-but-tired-of-the-RAZR market (hi, high school and college market), then you more or less have captured the entire direction of the market. See, apple tried that. when I was school in the 90s, apple owned the (primary school) campus computer lab market... and really, nothing else. As far as I can tell, it didn't help them much at all, other than to get a generation of people thinking of apple as slow, obsolete crap (which is as much a result of the school district keeping them around too long as anything else.) edit: On the other hand, come to think of it, OS-x started getting real popular around the time most people my age started earning enough money to pay for a mac, so maybe I'm wrong and the policy was a resounding success? (I mean, I was born in '80, and as I've had a 'real job' since '97 or so because I skipped college to play in the .com boom, I sometimes forget that most people don't start earning money until their mid 20s.)