5 ms·

> The reason Apple does this is the same reason as ever: it they feel like this is the best way to make some sort of experience work, they will do it. And if th

by callc 2y ago

> The reason Apple does this is the same reason as ever: it they feel like this is the best way to make some sort of experience work, they will do it. And if they make fat stacks of cash in the process, they aren't going to be sad about it. This argument holds water only if the price were appropriate, not extortionate. Apple has shown the world for years they prioritize profit through control and not using industry standards. The PCI/e, NVMe (+more) standards give you the best experience: a modularized peripheral connection system. Appealing the capitalism, standards allow markets to exist and to compete in each component category. By not using the standard, Apple is saying "I don't want to compete on storage, I'd rather do it my own way and charge as much $$$ as possible." Appealing to best practices programming, these standards are like interfaces. If you were to make a really useful *nix command line tool, but decided to not allow the output to be easily used by downstream programs through `|` pipelines by reason of "good experience" ("Why would you want to leave my good program? The flowers are so nice!", people would rightfully see you as stuck up and having the gall to think you know what's best for end users. Appealing to psychology, Apple is not your friend. They are a powerful profit-driven company that dodges taxes and that fosters a cult-like belief system. I say this as an iPhone user and as a latest generation white-plastic macbook user. They make good devices. How much better could their devices be if they didn't spend so much effort in anti right to repair and anti compatibility?

oneplane 2y ago
The price is what the market is willing to pay. Not the actual cost of the physical components. Pricing has always been like that. The market just isn't always willing to pay huge margins. With Apple they do. > give you the best experience Hardly. For practically every normal user, the best experience is when they don't have to think about hardware or specs at all, forever. Doesn't just apply to computers either. If anything, people doing the things they want with the hardware not existing at all, that would be even better since they didn't want to deal with it in the first place. Reality is of course that the things they want to do are implemented in software, and software runs on hardware. And they still would rather have it not exist, and not think about it. And anything you do that forces them to think about it is a detractor, even if it was "The Right Thing". It's why Android beats Windows, and mobile devices like phones and tablets beat PCs; there is a whole lot less dealing with the details of the hardware and the software, and more "doing what you intended to do", whatever that might be. Even if the hardware and software is almost universally worse (at the very least somewhere until desktop-class ARM came around). As far as all your other concepts, reality says the thing Apple does in the Apple way makes them more money than everyone else. So either they are already doing the things you want them to do and they work, or they are not doing the things you want them to do because they don't work to generate the same concentration of money (which is what they exist for, as I already wrote).
seec 2y ago
I am an old school Apple user (first personal machine a second-hand Pismo PowerBook) and I find it dumbfounding how most of their customers justify any of their predatory behavior in ways that boggles the mind. It really is cult-like behavior, there is no other way to put it. There is the famous piece of writing by Umberto Eco about Macs being catholic (https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html) and it really feels like that, their users tend to be highly religious, just not to a traditional religion. You can use the stuff and like it, find it better in many ways but it is hard to actually accept the commercial practice with a straight face.
- oneplane 2y ago
  You make it sound like people cannot make a distinction between "I like it and I can afford it, even if the prices are high" and "commercial value extraction in a post-capitalistic hellscape is bad". Apple isn't some magic company where if they have extreme margins the people that buy the stuff do mental gymnastics where the margins are not extreme. Of course they are. But people buying it have accepted that they can vote with their wallet, and they still vote to pay and get the product, rather than not pay and hope the signal is strong enough to lower the margins and maybe buy a product later if it is cheaper. Most products you buy are not priced just a sliver higher than the cost of production, or even the cost of production plus R&D. They are priced at the maximum revenue possible. As long as Apple can sell NAND chips at 1000% markup, they will do it. And as long as it doesn't hurt people enough, they will keep buying it. Look at the clothing nonsense, bags, shoes etc. You can get a plastic bag made out of 10 cents of material and 2 cents of manufacturing line time but you'll have to pay $500 because it's special to some people. Or most of the plastic shoes that Nike makes, they aren't really made with $200 of plastic, that's going to be maybe $10 of material in total. There might be a much higher manufacturing cost, so maybe that's another $10. That means there's $180 going straight to Nike. But you don't see people coming to HN to complain about that, because somehow that's okay. Where you assign some loud Apple users (let's call that the vocal minority) some cult or religious status for their behaviour, you're doing a disservice to yourself and the rest of the people that just want to stuff and will pay the price even if they don't really like it. Presumably because saving $2k in cost on a computer costs them more in UX, productivity or forced change, which they don't want, and the company extracts as much money as they can for it ($1k wheels anyone?). Maybe the vocal minority thinks a computer can be a status symbol. But that's mostly just in their mind. The same high school mentality (and group behaviour) applies to the shoes or bags mentioned above. Trying to make this seem like a special Apple case is pretty useless. It's capitalism at work, and you're part of it. Whether you can live with that is mostly just up to you and not much of a technology or startup discussion. We might even end up more in the area of philosophy than anything else.

by callc 2y ago

oneplane 2y ago

The price is what the market is willing to pay. Not the actual cost of the physical components. Pricing has always been like that. The market just isn't always willing to pay huge margins. With Apple they do. > give you the best experience Hardly. For practically every normal user, the best experience is when they don't have to think about hardware or specs at all, forever. Doesn't just apply to computers either. If anything, people doing the things they want with the hardware not existing at all, that would be even better since they didn't want to deal with it in the first place. Reality is of course that the things they want to do are implemented in software, and software runs on hardware. And they still would rather have it not exist, and not think about it. And anything you do that forces them to think about it is a detractor, even if it was "The Right Thing". It's why Android beats Windows, and mobile devices like phones and tablets beat PCs; there is a whole lot less dealing with the details of the hardware and the software, and more "doing what you intended to do", whatever that might be. Even if the hardware and software is almost universally worse (at the very least somewhere until desktop-class ARM came around). As far as all your other concepts, reality says the thing Apple does in the Apple way makes them more money than everyone else. So either they are already doing the things you want them to do and they work, or they are not doing the things you want them to do because they don't work to generate the same concentration of money (which is what they exist for, as I already wrote).

seec 2y ago

I am an old school Apple user (first personal machine a second-hand Pismo PowerBook) and I find it dumbfounding how most of their customers justify any of their predatory behavior in ways that boggles the mind. It really is cult-like behavior, there is no other way to put it. There is the famous piece of writing by Umberto Eco about Macs being catholic (https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html) and it really feels like that, their users tend to be highly religious, just not to a traditional religion. You can use the stuff and like it, find it better in many ways but it is hard to actually accept the commercial practice with a straight face.

oneplane 2y ago
You make it sound like people cannot make a distinction between "I like it and I can afford it, even if the prices are high" and "commercial value extraction in a post-capitalistic hellscape is bad". Apple isn't some magic company where if they have extreme margins the people that buy the stuff do mental gymnastics where the margins are not extreme. Of course they are. But people buying it have accepted that they can vote with their wallet, and they still vote to pay and get the product, rather than not pay and hope the signal is strong enough to lower the margins and maybe buy a product later if it is cheaper. Most products you buy are not priced just a sliver higher than the cost of production, or even the cost of production plus R&D. They are priced at the maximum revenue possible. As long as Apple can sell NAND chips at 1000% markup, they will do it. And as long as it doesn't hurt people enough, they will keep buying it. Look at the clothing nonsense, bags, shoes etc. You can get a plastic bag made out of 10 cents of material and 2 cents of manufacturing line time but you'll have to pay $500 because it's special to some people. Or most of the plastic shoes that Nike makes, they aren't really made with $200 of plastic, that's going to be maybe $10 of material in total. There might be a much higher manufacturing cost, so maybe that's another $10. That means there's $180 going straight to Nike. But you don't see people coming to HN to complain about that, because somehow that's okay. Where you assign some loud Apple users (let's call that the vocal minority) some cult or religious status for their behaviour, you're doing a disservice to yourself and the rest of the people that just want to stuff and will pay the price even if they don't really like it. Presumably because saving $2k in cost on a computer costs them more in UX, productivity or forced change, which they don't want, and the company extracts as much money as they can for it ($1k wheels anyone?). Maybe the vocal minority thinks a computer can be a status symbol. But that's mostly just in their mind. The same high school mentality (and group behaviour) applies to the shoes or bags mentioned above. Trying to make this seem like a special Apple case is pretty useless. It's capitalism at work, and you're part of it. Whether you can live with that is mostly just up to you and not much of a technology or startup discussion. We might even end up more in the area of philosophy than anything else.