Posted by nivethan 4 days ago
I was recently thinking the exact same thing as the author here; as a teen I got my ipod and instantly respected the graceful design and felt shocked how shoddy my previous cheap mp3 player was in comparison.
I am also convinced that he was fully responsible for keeping Apple on this path and that it is almost impossible to stop others from diluting the craftsmanship towards mediocrity as the group size grows. Big CEOs get labelled as greedy exploiters in a single brushstroke by people who don’t seem to care to read up.
I ventured inside a few times to checkout the latest technological offerings of Apple, and was impressed. None of the sales staff ever approached me, but I was able to afford the devices, despite perhaps being dressed as though I couldn't. The irony is that even some of the poorest people in the UK I see walking around with iPhones and their children use iPads.
I never purchased or owned an Apple device to this day, but I did appreciate the well built hardware and snappy software.
https://www.amazon.com/Archos-Jukebox-6000-Player-Drive/dp/B...
The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod.
I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.
The iPhone or your equivalent Android device truly is one of the most useful inventions humanity has ever created, especially for the era that we currently exist in.
and you keep a phone 1-8 years but a car 3-20 years or 4x as long? seems like a bad ratio
Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did.
Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.
Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.
Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.
Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.
All of the cheaper options make pretty significant trade offs. Ones that you might not care about, but that others do.
The same can’t be said for a Rolex where the much cheaper options are better in every way other than flexing.
The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of -more expensive materials -better finishing -superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)
The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)
It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.
The illusion is that you're getting a computer and not a collection of knickknacks and appliances.
Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)
Secondly I think the only thing I really miss that's particular to smartphones is the map. Everything else is either a dumb gimmick or actually bad and all of it is to just get you're attention so they can sell it.
I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.
If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!
You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!
Apple stuff has always been expensive, yes, but it's not "luxury". You get what you pay for. Apple products are the best in their category, despite the surprisingly organized hate machine that has existed forever.
But one thing that really stuck with me was a few years back when I was making a spreadsheet of standard tech choices available for new employees for a startup, and almost all the Linux or Windows laptops out there that I could trust to last out of the box as long as a (non-butterfly-keyboard) Macbook had a baseline of 1080p screens, with upcharges just to get to 1440p. It might be better these days, but I felt like I was taking crazy pills just trying to find a certain baseline of quality for tech that would be getting used all the time every day.
Screens have gotten better thankfully, but now the thing is to use screen panels that are only practically usable at 1.5x/150% UI scaling for some reason. It’s better than being stuck with those horrid 1366x768 TN panels that used to plague laptops, but it’s still more annoying than panels that can do integer scaling well. Given the choice between 1.5x panel and its 1x decent resolution counterpart, I’d actually prefer the latter just because it’s less trouble.
If you're against the idea of selling things that are cheap to make at high prices by relying on branding, you might not want to call Cartier or Rolex products "genuinely valuable". Jewelry is not fundamentally expensive.
Apple hired Ahrendts in 2013 to head its retail efforts. She previously led Burberry, where she transformed the brand into a global luxury icon.
Before Ahrendts, Steve Jobs brought in Ron Johnson in 2000 to lead the retail revamp. Johnson, had experience at Target.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300
I got this in 1999... So it might not fit your exact timeframe.
My friend put Tupac's Changes song on there. That wasn't my first mp3 but it was the first on a pocket sized device.
> Part of my brain was saying "this place is bullshit and I use it to clown on the staff," and part of my brain was saying "I want the luxury good!! and I am going to purchase it now."