You're right. The thing is that for most consumers Apple always has been a designer brand. But the shift I'm referring to is that Apple is becoming a designer brand within the consumer base that already could afford it. The MacBook Pro is a good example. Really expensive for a laptop. Now with $1200-$1300 iPhones becoming the norm, Apple is transitioning to designer-level prices even for first-world consumers.That’s literally the way personal computing technology has been sold for decades. When has owning the latest tech not cost a premium over the stuff from one or two years ago? I don’t own many Apple products, but I have always considered Apple to be a designer brand that was as much about style as it was about anything else. I never owned an iPod because there were music players with more capacity and better sound quality for less, but they just didn’t look as cool or work as easily as the iPod. Sometimes I think the Apple premium is worth it, and sometimes I don’t.
[doublepost=1538321229][/doublepost]
The thing is that Apple is a really smart company. Have they researched what you're proposing? Better believe it. They priced the iPhone where it is after exhaustive study, I'm sure. They know they can get away with it, all while they're boosting prices & services revenue in order to begin compensating for mid-term declines in consumer hardware as we know it. Essentially they're staying one step ahead of the game at all times, and the new iPhone lineup shows it: The XR is is the new medium, yet it is priced like the previous top-end. The X and now XS / Max set the new standard for the $1,000+ market segment. So Apple is taking that, as well as the "old" high-end (now occupied by the XR), and everything else beneath that trickles down to their previous handsets in price. So yes Apple isn't going for the bottom of the barrel like Android and that's precisely where I think Google found their killer angle (similar to Windows vs Mac OS). Apple knows this so they aren't wasting their time competing in those markets. As far as we know the Apple Car is till happening, and better believe that an AR device is in the works. Apple knows what they're doing and have the roadmap for the next 3-5 years pretty darn well figured out it seems.I think thats a dangerous strategy in the long term when you consider how many demographics buy the iPhone. If they stop producing interesting products for the mainstream and expect them to purchase much older handsets, it’s likely to cause a shift to more affordable options with modern features.
Last edited: