7 ms·

There’s a bunch of evidence that this isn't true. People seem to choose quality when they have an option. The rise of Apple is not because people are “sheep”,

by dijit 2y ago

There’s a bunch of evidence that this isn't true. People seem to choose quality when they have an option. The rise of Apple is not because people are “sheep”, it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid. People can forgive poor quality with innovation, or in the pursuit of pure art- but the more crappy things get the more you notice people gravitating towards higher quality items/content. The “issue” is when there’s a total monopoly or an oligopoly that is racing to the bottom, which seems to happen quite often, because building high margin things tends to be more risky, and MBAs are risk averse.

steveBK123 2y ago
I think given enough time and experience where people can discover rock bottom dollars isn’t working, they will gravitate towards higher perceived value per dollar. Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
- ronsor 2y ago
  It's also good to remember that Macs weren't exactly that stable until Mac OS X.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    They were stable enough and the plug and play actually worked.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    And yet people kept buying windows and whining about it many versions of OS X later.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    Even so, the more Windows machines I had back in the day, the less real work I got done. Something was always not working, with no obvious pattern. Most problems took work to fix. I learned not to install and uninstall things. Even if I needed to. The more Mac’s I had, the more likely I ran into a problem as well. But it was usually just some glitch.
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
      - Clubber 2y ago
        >Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs. I second this. My mom switched to a iMac G4 and never needed me again, except that time she plugged the power strip into itself. It got to the point where I didn't want to tell people I worked with computers.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    Nor was Windows in the 95/98/Me era, it was a Hobson's choice back then.
- detourdog 2y ago
  During that 20 years experts dismissed Apple as dying and too risky windows was the smart investment just like VHS.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Mostly windows machines of comparable spec could be had for 10% less, but most importantly there were many OEMs willing to sell objectively bad underspecced machines that were 50-75% cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Remember the era when people had overheating laptops etc.
    - detourdog 2y ago
      Price comparing Macs and PCs has rarely been accurate. The experts I remember would hammer the price difference and say Apple was dying so the investment isn’t worth it.
    - devmor 2y ago
      This is happening again now, with a new addition (well, resurgent) of insidious price cutting strategy: adware. Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain. 1. https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
      - steveBK123 2y ago
        At this point it’s like the old story about boots - too poor to afford cheap ones. Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        $240 for that, huh. I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster. It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
- leptons 2y ago
  How did Apple "win"? They have always been a fraction of the market share of desktop/laptop computers, and they are only popular on mobile in the US, worldwide Android is dominant with 72% of the market. If you mean money===success, then sure, they have money, but do you compare their money to all the companies making PCs and all the companies making Android phones in the world combined? Apple fans have 1 single company to choose from, but PC/Android fans have hundreds of options - I can get a PC or Android in hundreds of form factors, whatever I need but Apple only sells what Apple makes. Sounds to me like PC/Android fans are the real "winners". >Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years. This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Everyone is a winner of their own story
  - CamJN 2y ago
    AAPL 3.785T > MSFT 3.134T. In the only measure that matters for American companies, Apple won.
    - brightlancer 2y ago
      That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them. Except that they aren't in the same business. On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.
      - steveBK123 2y ago
        I can't find the exact stat right now with some light google, but I recall there was a stat that while Apple doesn't have majority of user base, they essentially have an outsized share of the profit due to the average sales price & associated profit margins. In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > Apple won only after windows... Apple won after Sony dropped the ball on HDD Walkmans and Nokia, Motorola, Palm, and Blackberry failed to reject carrier bloatware. Macs are a side hustle for Apple, and MS is still the dominant player for desktop computing.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Apple has never "won" in the sense that Windows has always had by far more installed desktops. Android also by far runs more phones than iOS. Apple "won" the wealthy Western market, which is all that has ever mattered to them.
scarface_74 2y ago
The iPhone especially in America is a unique case. Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. But all of the major and even minor carriers either subsidize the phone or have no interest payment plans between 24-36 months. The price difference is negligible over 3 years. No other product is like that. Even today in the US, the Mac only has around 15% market share.
- tokinonagare 2y ago
  > The iPhone especially in America is a unique case. iPhones have a >50% market share in Japan, Canada, and in a few European countries (Danmark, Sweden). The common point I see between all those is that they are high-income countries.
- tredre3 2y ago
  > Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. The only honest way of comparing Android to iPhone pricing, in my opinion, is to compare flagships. The S24 and the Pixel 9 are the exact same price as the iPhone 16. The S24+ is more expensive than the iPhone 16 Pro.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    And if you only talk about market share in the premium market, it’s even more skewed to iOS. Google Pixel phones only make up 4% of the US market. https://chromeunboxed.com/google-pixel-phone-sales-see-their-best-ever-quarter-with-pixel-9-launch/ https://chromeunboxed.com/google-pixel-phone-sales-see-their... And Samsung sells around 31 million S24 phones https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-2024-goal-sell-more-high-end-phones_id152284 https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-2024-goal-sell-more-... Android users aren’t buying high end phones for the most part
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- dagmx 2y ago
  While I agree with your larger point, I just wanted to point out some inaccuracies > Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android FWIW this is only true if you’re not comparing within market segments. If you stick to the same market segment, then they’re about on par with equivalent Android phones for price. They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories. > The iPhone especially in America is a unique case The iPhone market share is relative to the premium phone market share of most locations. Which in turn is relative to the spending power of the populations. iPhones dominate the premium market share compared to Android. I’m actually curious what the Mac market share is when framed to just “premium devices, and non-gaming”. I suspect, but cannot backup, that Macs do relatively well if constrained to that market. But most people who have premium computers do so for gaming, and the ones who want budget don’t have a Mac to cater to them.
kube-system 2y ago
I think most people choose value, which might mean that sometimes quality plays a factor, but rarely means it is the sole factor.
- dijit 2y ago
  It feels like a cheap shot to bring up the mechanical keyboard situation that is close to the hearts of most techies - but sometimes "value" can mean... quality. Sometimes it's not just about longevity, it's about how the product feels. This is especially true when it comes to our online content and- as adults- we have less time as we have children. Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Quality is almost always a component of "value", but competing with other priorities, e.g. cost. I think mechanical keyboards are a good example here, but maybe not in the way you were expecting. You may note that most PC sales are laptops these days, and nearly all of them eschew mechanical keyboards in favor of other priorities. And also, most desktops still ship with membrane keyboards, and only a tiny fraction of users replace them with a mechanical keyboard -- as you say, "techies". It's a niche preference that "most people" (from the title) do not find value in.
  - brightlancer 2y ago
    > Meaning quality is more important than quantity. It's not a binary choice. Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year. In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.
  - AndrewDucker 2y ago
    I've tried mechanical keyboards a few times. Wasn't a fan. Didn't like how they felt or the noise they made The idea that they're automatically better seems very odd to me.
mixdup 2y ago
Apple doesn't have 100% market share and the title is "most people" The fact that Android has a larger market share, and Apple has a larger share of revenue and profit actually goes to show that the larger mass market doesn't care about quality as much as price
- AndrewDucker 2y ago
  I absolutely care about quality and I choose Android. The fact that different people choose different qualities should surprise nobody. (Some people are obviously price constrained out of the Apple price bracket, but there are also plenty of people who actively prefer Android)
  - kbelder 2y ago
    It still kind of low-key boggles my mind that so many developers choose iPhones and buy into that ecosystem. Not criticizing them... everybody makes their own choices and gets to decide what's good for themselves. But I just don't get it. (And it's not because I haven't heard the stated reasons. They just don't resonate with me.)
croes 2y ago
>it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid. There’s a bunch of evidence that this is also not true.

by dijit 2y ago

steveBK123 2y ago

I think given enough time and experience where people can discover rock bottom dollars isn’t working, they will gravitate towards higher perceived value per dollar. Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.

ronsor 2y ago
It's also good to remember that Macs weren't exactly that stable until Mac OS X.
- detourdog 2y ago
  They were stable enough and the plug and play actually worked.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  And yet people kept buying windows and whining about it many versions of OS X later.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Even so, the more Windows machines I had back in the day, the less real work I got done. Something was always not working, with no obvious pattern. Most problems took work to fix. I learned not to install and uninstall things. Even if I needed to. The more Mac’s I had, the more likely I ran into a problem as well. But it was usually just some glitch.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
    - Clubber 2y ago
      >Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs. I second this. My mom switched to a iMac G4 and never needed me again, except that time she plugged the power strip into itself. It got to the point where I didn't want to tell people I worked with computers.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  Nor was Windows in the 95/98/Me era, it was a Hobson's choice back then.
detourdog 2y ago
During that 20 years experts dismissed Apple as dying and too risky windows was the smart investment just like VHS.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Mostly windows machines of comparable spec could be had for 10% less, but most importantly there were many OEMs willing to sell objectively bad underspecced machines that were 50-75% cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Remember the era when people had overheating laptops etc.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    Price comparing Macs and PCs has rarely been accurate. The experts I remember would hammer the price difference and say Apple was dying so the investment isn’t worth it.
  - devmor 2y ago
    This is happening again now, with a new addition (well, resurgent) of insidious price cutting strategy: adware. Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain. 1. https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      At this point it’s like the old story about boots - too poor to afford cheap ones. Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      $240 for that, huh. I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster. It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
leptons 2y ago
How did Apple "win"? They have always been a fraction of the market share of desktop/laptop computers, and they are only popular on mobile in the US, worldwide Android is dominant with 72% of the market. If you mean money===success, then sure, they have money, but do you compare their money to all the companies making PCs and all the companies making Android phones in the world combined? Apple fans have 1 single company to choose from, but PC/Android fans have hundreds of options - I can get a PC or Android in hundreds of form factors, whatever I need but Apple only sells what Apple makes. Sounds to me like PC/Android fans are the real "winners". >Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years. This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Everyone is a winner of their own story
- CamJN 2y ago
  AAPL 3.785T > MSFT 3.134T. In the only measure that matters for American companies, Apple won.
  - brightlancer 2y ago
    That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them. Except that they aren't in the same business. On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      I can't find the exact stat right now with some light google, but I recall there was a stat that while Apple doesn't have majority of user base, they essentially have an outsized share of the profit due to the average sales price & associated profit margins. In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.
dehrmann 2y ago
> Apple won only after windows... Apple won after Sony dropped the ball on HDD Walkmans and Nokia, Motorola, Palm, and Blackberry failed to reject carrier bloatware. Macs are a side hustle for Apple, and MS is still the dominant player for desktop computing.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Apple has never "won" in the sense that Windows has always had by far more installed desktops. Android also by far runs more phones than iOS. Apple "won" the wealthy Western market, which is all that has ever mattered to them.

scarface_74 2y ago

The iPhone especially in America is a unique case. Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. But all of the major and even minor carriers either subsidize the phone or have no interest payment plans between 24-36 months. The price difference is negligible over 3 years. No other product is like that. Even today in the US, the Mac only has around 15% market share.

tokinonagare 2y ago
> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case. iPhones have a >50% market share in Japan, Canada, and in a few European countries (Danmark, Sweden). The common point I see between all those is that they are high-income countries.
tredre3 2y ago
> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. The only honest way of comparing Android to iPhone pricing, in my opinion, is to compare flagships. The S24 and the Pixel 9 are the exact same price as the iPhone 16. The S24+ is more expensive than the iPhone 16 Pro.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And if you only talk about market share in the premium market, it’s even more skewed to iOS. Google Pixel phones only make up 4% of the US market. https://chromeunboxed.com/google-pixel-phone-sales-see-their-best-ever-quarter-with-pixel-9-launch/ https://chromeunboxed.com/google-pixel-phone-sales-see-their... And Samsung sells around 31 million S24 phones https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-2024-goal-sell-more-high-end-phones_id152284 https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-2024-goal-sell-more-... Android users aren’t buying high end phones for the most part
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dagmx 2y ago
While I agree with your larger point, I just wanted to point out some inaccuracies > Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android FWIW this is only true if you’re not comparing within market segments. If you stick to the same market segment, then they’re about on par with equivalent Android phones for price. They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories. > The iPhone especially in America is a unique case The iPhone market share is relative to the premium phone market share of most locations. Which in turn is relative to the spending power of the populations. iPhones dominate the premium market share compared to Android. I’m actually curious what the Mac market share is when framed to just “premium devices, and non-gaming”. I suspect, but cannot backup, that Macs do relatively well if constrained to that market. But most people who have premium computers do so for gaming, and the ones who want budget don’t have a Mac to cater to them.

kube-system 2y ago

I think most people choose value, which might mean that sometimes quality plays a factor, but rarely means it is the sole factor.

dijit 2y ago
It feels like a cheap shot to bring up the mechanical keyboard situation that is close to the hearts of most techies - but sometimes "value" can mean... quality. Sometimes it's not just about longevity, it's about how the product feels. This is especially true when it comes to our online content and- as adults- we have less time as we have children. Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
- kube-system 2y ago
  Quality is almost always a component of "value", but competing with other priorities, e.g. cost. I think mechanical keyboards are a good example here, but maybe not in the way you were expecting. You may note that most PC sales are laptops these days, and nearly all of them eschew mechanical keyboards in favor of other priorities. And also, most desktops still ship with membrane keyboards, and only a tiny fraction of users replace them with a mechanical keyboard -- as you say, "techies". It's a niche preference that "most people" (from the title) do not find value in.
- brightlancer 2y ago
  > Meaning quality is more important than quantity. It's not a binary choice. Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year. In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.
- AndrewDucker 2y ago
  I've tried mechanical keyboards a few times. Wasn't a fan. Didn't like how they felt or the noise they made The idea that they're automatically better seems very odd to me.

mixdup 2y ago

Apple doesn't have 100% market share and the title is "most people" The fact that Android has a larger market share, and Apple has a larger share of revenue and profit actually goes to show that the larger mass market doesn't care about quality as much as price

AndrewDucker 2y ago
I absolutely care about quality and I choose Android. The fact that different people choose different qualities should surprise nobody. (Some people are obviously price constrained out of the Apple price bracket, but there are also plenty of people who actively prefer Android)
- kbelder 2y ago
  It still kind of low-key boggles my mind that so many developers choose iPhones and buy into that ecosystem. Not criticizing them... everybody makes their own choices and gets to decide what's good for themselves. But I just don't get it. (And it's not because I haven't heard the stated reasons. They just don't resonate with me.)

croes 2y ago

>it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid. There’s a bunch of evidence that this is also not true.