There's one major difference between a Rolex and an Apple Watch that immediately comes to mind.
A Rolex won't become obsolete in two years and won't require you to buy another one to keep up with OS upgrades. A Rolex deserves its markup because its built to last lifetimes and its recommended service repair is once every 4-5 years.
Yeah, and a Rolex service is typically more expensive than an Apple Watch costs to buy.
Also, let me know where you can buy a Rolex for $500.
They are two different products, and talking about them like they were the same is just stupid.
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Is it one per employee? Since they would probably abuse it if more.
The letter said for personal use, so if they start buying a bunch and selling them, I'm thinking they would be quickly stopped.
Also the watches have a serial number, would not be hard to track employee purchased watches that suddenly got linked to a non-employee iTunes account.
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According to a teardown report from research firm IHS, the components and manufacturing cost of a 16GB iPhone 6 cost Apple $200.10. The device is selling for $649 in the U.S. without a contract with a wireless carrier. That gives the device a profit margin of about 69%.
You're beginning to embarrass yourself with such a woeful lack of understanding of how business works.
Let's pretend just for a moment that this report you reference is actually right and that this specific phone costs $200.10 and retails for $649.
You talk about profit margin, but you have not considered any of the actual costs of doing business. Hiring employees, rent, utilities, marketing, customer acquisition, R&D, prototyping, testing, losses, law suits, tax, distribution, and so on and so forth.
The iPhone 6 did not arrive from space aliens in the form of blue prints where all Apple had to do was buy the parts and put them together. They had to do extensive and expensive work just to figure out how to make these things. The numbers you are ignoring to make your point run into tens of millions of dollars, and what you are calling a profit margin has to pay back all those costs too.
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So now we're also expected to help Apple build a new gigantic eyesore campus in the middle of the Silicon Valley because they feel like being extravagant?
I can afford Apple Watch and Apple products just fine. Thank you for your concern. I just won't purchase something at a price I don't feel is reasonable.
That doesn't make me poor. It makes me smart with my money. $350 for a smartwatch is not reasonable. $250, on the other hand, would be.
Now imagine, if they dropped the price of the watch by $100, they would have at least one more sale if not many more. I would be willing to bet that people who are on the fence would suddenly become much more interested. Apple would still make a profit, just less of one. Not to mention it would undercut Motorola's less-capable $299 smartwatch, making the Apple Watch look much better by comparison. It would not suddenly be considered a loss, and it would not plunge Apple into a recession.
Your opinions are so ridiculous it's almost not worth responding to them.
First off, the Apple Campus is beautiful, and I don't understand what kind of sane person would call it an 'eyesore' especially since it is not easily visible unless you go looking for it.
Secondly, you have demonstrated a massive ignorance of how business works on this forum, so I think I'll trust the highly educated and intelligent employees of Apple to figure out pricing, margins, and profits.
The fact that you have arbitrarily decided that a smart watch should be $250 is about as meaningless as me deciding I can levitate. It does not make it true or correct.
