4 ms·

Almost all apple products are high priced. Even the cheaper one.

by iamgopal 7y ago

Austin_Conlon 7y ago
The high prices crippled the cube and cylindrical shaped ones.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lostgame 7y ago
  The cylindrical shaped ones were just crippled, de facto, according to Apple's own admission.
rytis 7y ago
I thought "charge more" is a good thing? /s
coldtea 7y ago
On the other hand, a lot of Apple products have no as-good rival -- at any price -- at least for a year or so after their introduction. Consider the iPhone and the then Android phones (which appeared later anyway). Consider the iPad and the vastly worst first competing tablets (back in 2010 or so), which in addition cost $100-$200 more than the iPad. Consider Apple Watch today and what's available from the competition (at the same category, which includes e.g. the Samsung watches and so, I know there are e.g. Garmin watches that last 2 weeks, but they have different target group and functionality). Consider the AirPods as well. (And, again, for all of those, I'm talking at launch and for the first 1-2 years. For some of those we have decent competition now).
blihp 7y ago
Apple products would be considered inexpensive compared to what NeXT charged. IIRC, a WebObjects license at the time was $50,000. There were good reasons for this, but when you hear 'NeXT was expensive' you really shouldn't be thinking Apple-level expensive... they were at another level.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  I always assumed they were mostly sold to academics and R&D departments. Super-expensive workstations were a thing back then, so NeXT were competing with other super-expensive desktops from SGI, Sun, etc - not with the Mac/Windows consumer market.
  - blihp 7y ago
    Exactly. So they had orders of magnitude fewer customers with orders of magnitude higher prices than Apple today. But by the time WebObjects became a thing NeXT was out of the workstation business so the price was purely for the software. The good news is that in the talk, Steve mentioned that the Enterprise WebObjects (probably the one you needed: EOF was for WebObjects what Cocoa was for OS X) license was $25k so it had started to drop. Even back then free was tough to compete with...
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      > Even back then free was tough to compete with... At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there. While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.
  - kartickv 7y ago
    Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit. Put differently, any platform needs a critical mass to survive, and if they price it so high, it won't have that critical mass, causing it to die, in which case the development cost would be wasted. Surely people in the 80s weren't so dumb as to not understand network effects, so what am I missing?
    - 7y ago

Almost all apple products are high priced. Even the cheaper one.

Austin_Conlon 7y ago

The high prices crippled the cube and cylindrical shaped ones.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lostgame 7y ago
The cylindrical shaped ones were just crippled, de facto, according to Apple's own admission.

rytis 7y ago

I thought "charge more" is a good thing? /s

coldtea 7y ago

On the other hand, a lot of Apple products have no as-good rival -- at any price -- at least for a year or so after their introduction. Consider the iPhone and the then Android phones (which appeared later anyway). Consider the iPad and the vastly worst first competing tablets (back in 2010 or so), which in addition cost $100-$200 more than the iPad. Consider Apple Watch today and what's available from the competition (at the same category, which includes e.g. the Samsung watches and so, I know there are e.g. Garmin watches that last 2 weeks, but they have different target group and functionality). Consider the AirPods as well. (And, again, for all of those, I'm talking at launch and for the first 1-2 years. For some of those we have decent competition now).

blihp 7y ago

Apple products would be considered inexpensive compared to what NeXT charged. IIRC, a WebObjects license at the time was $50,000. There were good reasons for this, but when you hear 'NeXT was expensive' you really shouldn't be thinking Apple-level expensive... they were at another level.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
I always assumed they were mostly sold to academics and R&D departments. Super-expensive workstations were a thing back then, so NeXT were competing with other super-expensive desktops from SGI, Sun, etc - not with the Mac/Windows consumer market.
- blihp 7y ago
  Exactly. So they had orders of magnitude fewer customers with orders of magnitude higher prices than Apple today. But by the time WebObjects became a thing NeXT was out of the workstation business so the price was purely for the software. The good news is that in the talk, Steve mentioned that the Enterprise WebObjects (probably the one you needed: EOF was for WebObjects what Cocoa was for OS X) license was $25k so it had started to drop. Even back then free was tough to compete with...
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    > Even back then free was tough to compete with... At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there. While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.
- kartickv 7y ago
  Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit. Put differently, any platform needs a critical mass to survive, and if they price it so high, it won't have that critical mass, causing it to die, in which case the development cost would be wasted. Surely people in the 80s weren't so dumb as to not understand network effects, so what am I missing?
  - 7y ago