<story><title>Apple is regressing to their 1990s identity</title><url>https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/8/1_Apple_is_reverting_to_their_1990s_disposition.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>orev</author><text>From the headline I thought this was going to be about them having too many SKUs, but after reading I see it’s just the standard techie tropes about overpriced and closed systems.&lt;p&gt;The thing is that consumers (clearly) don’t care about that stuff. There is no such thing as “overpriced” as long as the item is selling. Consumers determine the price of something based on the single factor of “what they are willing to pay”. If Apple can sell devices at that price, and consumers are willing to pay it, then it is by definition not overpriced.&lt;p&gt;Opennes is also overvalued for techies. While I am on the side of openness myself, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about it. They only care about the value they are getting from the product. There might be a few people who really want to crack open the case, but they do not have any significant presence in the market.&lt;p&gt;What consumers &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; care about is feeling good about their purchase, and the Apple of the 1990s had so many products and was so unfocused that none of the products were good, and consumers felt bad when they bought them.&lt;p&gt;The SKU problem is the same as today. Now you have half a dozen iPads to choose from, and a number of laptops that all seem to be the same except for half an inch between models. No matter what you pick, you leave the store with a sense of FOMO, not knowing if you really picked the right model. That is really what Steve did — you went in and bought the only option they gave you, and you felt confident you got the right one.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple is regressing to their 1990s identity</title><url>https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/8/1_Apple_is_reverting_to_their_1990s_disposition.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>askafriend</author><text>No they&amp;#x27;re not. They&amp;#x27;re a different company serving a different, and now global audience. Consider that Apple is more than 5% of America&amp;#x27;s entire GDP, and 1% of the world&amp;#x27;s entire GDP. There are ~1 billion people in the Apple ecosystem and that number is an under-estimate. When Apple chooses to add Sapphire as a material to the Apple Watch or iPhone, they affect global prices for the raw material.&lt;p&gt;People still don&amp;#x27;t get it. It&amp;#x27;s not a game of pattern matching with their past. Not only have they and their customers changed, but the world has changed. Computing has changed.&lt;p&gt;These articles always fail to consider context in favor of the easy, selective, myopic pattern matching.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t take this to mean that Apple is above criticism. They&amp;#x27;re not. But articles like this are lazy.</text></comment>