The issue is that I am a premium product person… I’m one of the guys that wants a washing machine that costs three times as much but never dies, who values the

The issue is that I am a premium product person… I’m one of the guys that wants a washing machine that costs three times as much but never dies, who values the fact my iPhones can last upwards of 6 years in total when I pass them on to my partner and they continue getting security updates. I am happy to pay extra for quality when it feels justified. The new watch band is a ripoff not because of its intrinsic price/quality proposition… but because I can no longer look at it think “sounds about right for a quality product”. This isn’t intrinsically Apple making a price point choice, this is the entire global economy shifting at a rate faster than my brain as a consumer can keep up. I can’t as a rational consumer be expected to do research into global fabric watch band production, long term elasticity and sweat resistance, and decide that $60 in AUD is a good price for the item in question, my brain has multiple decades of prior data built up into the kinds of simple heuristics that everyone develops, and these heuristics based on past economic data set off the “fuck off mate, that’s too much for that” thought in my brain and thus Apple loses a sale. This sort of subconscious (sometimes conscious) thought process is going to be happening thousands of times a day in Apple stores... and it’s made worse because the more clued in customers know that Apple could sacrifice some of their ludicrously juicy profit margins to try and mitigate this feeling their customers are starting to experience… but we all know they won’t do that because that’s not good business, which just sharpens that feeling of “fuck off, that’s too much” because we know not only are they making a premium product that will cost us more, we know they are deliberately choosing to exploit the trust we have in them to make quality products, to overcharge for those quality products because we aren’t necessarily sure where else we will get sufficiently good quality. When everyone in the world except the richest people and companies are making less money because of inflation related margin squeezing, the richer the company the more egregious it looks and this runs the risks of alienating customers from the brand, or more likely, driving down ancillary sales as customers can only justify the main device and buy fewer accessories, perhaps eventually even hurting Apple’s beloved “Customer SAT(isfaction)” metrics they are so proud of. I know I’ve been less satisfied with the products for years now based almost entirely on the price. Like I said, I don’t mind paying extra for quality, I resent being taken to the cleaners for it.