No, you call it overpriced when it's more than you want to spend. That's very different than "it is."
See above: countless facts, numbers, and math.
I only look at the money and what I am getting. End of story. For the same price, Apple is offering me an inferior product than before. And before you respond with the 8 Plus, I mean a new product. The pricing is going to be maintained next year and after 2 years the 8 Plus will be discontinued and the XR will take its place. So bottomline is, they are forcing the Plus users to pay $1000
You've also gone to great efforts to trash Apple for its various "scandals." So maybe you aren't an Android fan, and maybe you're trying to justify your purchase to yourself? Who knows. People will go through the strangest machinations to rationalize their decisions.
i7guy was bringing up the Note 7 scandal and how Ferraris are supposedly flawed. I pointed out similar scandals by Apple and how it isn't remotely similar to Ferrari. I don't need to rationalise my purchase decision. I am very happy with the Note 9 and until Apple releases a competent flagship for 1000 bucks complete with all bells and whistles, I am not coming back to iOS. As I said before the price wouldn't be a issue if it was an innovative product. I spent $1200 on a single graphics card because it had no competition in the market and has revolutionary new features. The same $1200 could have been spent on a XS Max which in my view is a clone to the Note 9 at double the cost, just because Apple can charge anything they want.
If I compare the profit margins of how Nvidia priced their card like what is going on here, it would be almost the same as before despite double pricing simply because of how big the die size is and how much it costs to produce. But it was innovative, that's what hooked me. Apple's cost structure is irrelevant to me as there is absolutely NOTHING innovative about the XS Max which warrants the price tag.
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This line resonates with me, but it still underscores the lack of understanding that people regarding why things cost as much as they do. The Bill of Materials do contribute to the cost of a product, but there's a lot of other stuff that folks don't appreciate.
Case in point.
iPhone
1. Components - most people see component cost as the biggest contributor to price. I'm not sure that it has as much impact as most people feel. But that's just an opinion.
2. Assembly - most folks understand that putting these things together contribute. Americans understand manufacturing as it has always been a major part of the American story. However, most folks just think "ahh, the cost is small. Just a bunch of Chinese guys working in a sweatshop putting these things together."
3. Software - here's where I think most people don't appreciate the costs. The software to run these things take time and energy and talent to develop. These engineers and designers aren't cheap, and if they are, there's lots of them. So the cost to create the software is very high. And like the hardware, it's a continual cost as the software has to be refined and then updated year after year after year.
4. Overhead - I would surmise that most folks understand overhead. I would also surmise that most large/mega-large OEMs are very efficient and have minimized overhead.
5. Failures - Here's the one that always gets me. Failures and duds. I'm not talking about the iPhones that don't make it through the assembly line because of imperfections, that's factored in the Assembly portion. I'm talking about all of the prototypes and other things that these companies are messing around with in their design labs. Didn't Steve Jobs say something like for every iPhone product, there's 100's of things that they were working on that didn't work. Those failures cost time and money and need to be paid for.
#5 above is why pharma companies have such a bad reputation with the American public. You hear things like, well that pill has $2 worth of ingredients in it, why are they charging me $25 a pill. It's because every medicine that makes it through FDA approval, there's dozens of medicine that didn't work, but all of the time and money spent on it needs to be offset.
Anyways, sorry for the long rant.
Why should I care about Apple's costs. They have competitors in the market. If the competitor is coming out with a similar product at half price, its Apple's job to figure out their pricing in relation to the competition. I have zero sympathy for a profit making company.
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So much this. To underscore the point, all anyone has to do is do a search for “Note 9 reviews.” You’ll find all the usual high-traffic sites praising the device but lamenting how expensive it is, and many of those rave reviews recommend holding off. Why? The price relative to the value proposition.
I personally didn’t pull the trigger on a phone upgrade this year despite thinking long and hard about it. I am (quite irrationally) obsessed with the concept of value. But when I look at what the parts in all these devices actually cost, I don’t see an “overpriced” outcome. I see a lot of new, bleeding edge tech that, like nearly all tech, will get less expensive with time.
And from Apple’s perspective, I think 2018 begins to provide more clarity to the product lineup going forward even though it is at this moment arguably more confusing to the average customer. In fact, the only customers who truly got the shaft this year are those preferring smaller devices. Anyone with small hands is kind of screwed. (Insert Trump joke here.)
You see, there is the difference. There is nothing bleeding edge about this X series. Bezeless phones were the trend when the X launched and the only novel thing about it is FaceID which to me is as good as TouchID. Everything about the current gen phones has already been done before.
I bought the X last year and when I went to check out the XS Max it was basically an enlarged iPhone X for $1200. Boggles my mind how little improvement there was over an year and Apple sells this phone for 1k plus.
If anything the only tech bleeding edge about Apple these days would be the Apple Watch and the iPad Pro with its 144hz refresh rate. Those products don't have competition and I don't mind paying whatever Apple asks for it.
The Note 9 is not expensive. You can get one for $700
Thank you for the valuable and well thought out contribution to the discussion!
