Yeah, this doesn’t make sense. You’re basically saying that demand for the iPhone is perfectly inelastic to supply availability. You’d have to prove that 100% of smartphone buyers who want to buy an iPhone are willing to wait an indefinite amount of time for supply. This is laughably unrealistic. We can debate the %-age of potential buyers that are willing to wait vs those who are not, but it’s a given that those who would walk to a reasonable substitute certainly do exist (the number of “I decided to buy a Pixel 2 XL instead of waiting for the X” threads I’ve seen in a number of forums are confirmation of this). And I say this as someone who doesn’t personally consider an Android device a substitute good. But we fanboys are a minority compared to the market.
So, given the above, it would behoove Apple’s bottom line and quarterly results calls to try to fulfill demand as much as possible. Generating artificial scarcity would certainly be leaving money on the table (since they’d lose a non-zero number of sales in any given release cycle), and if shareholders found out they were intentionally doing that, I’d expect the board and Tim Cook to be ousted. If I were a shareholder, I’d certainly be calling for it.
Your reply and those of others who keep parroting this theory usually fail to take into account many things that could affect Apple’s supply chain. While it’s certainly possible that Apple is grossly incompetent, it’s more likely that the following things affect Apple’s supply (this is not an exhaustive list): 1) difficulty of ramping up new technology/manufacturing processes, 2) difficulty of accurate prediction of demand with relative precision because of 3) trying to keep inventory low because 4) keeping too much inventory is expensive (its easier and cheaper to produce supply as directly to demand as possible, rather than to produce to inventory, because inventory has a storage cost involved; this is why Apple is said to keep mere days of inventory on average; this is exactly how Cook set things up when he came to Apple, he saved them a load of money in that area), 5) Apple’s supply chain likely also has a certain amount of lead time in response to demand.
There’s likely many other factors that play into this that I’m not even mentioning here. Thus, chalking this up to “artificial scarcity” is merely an uninformed argument that is pretty much only used to slam the company because “how dare I not get launch day delivery! Apple must be intentionally slighting me and hundreds of other diehard fans to drum up demand!” while completely ignoring the obvious fact that generating unfulfillable demand is pointless, if it even worked that way (which it doesn’t). Most people don’t look at a product and go “gee that’s always sold out, maybe I should try to get one” because most people aren’t Apple diehards on MacRumors.
I’d love to see the context of that quote. I have a hunch that he didn’t mean what you think he meant. Steve was many things (including a great showman) but ultimately he wasn’t stupid when it came to doing business.
