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charlituna

macrumors G3
Jun 11, 2008
9,636
816
Los Angeles, CA
It matters because that is an example of predatory pricing.

According to my MS in Economics student cousin, no it is not. He said his prof even brought it up in class this morning.

An example of predatory pricing would be if Amazon, Sony etc all undercut the prices of books bought directly from them massive amounts to drive the ibook store out of business. Which is not allowed by Apple's rules.

But by the same token Amazon are allowed to charge the same price in the ibookstore and the decision is theirs and not Apple. So Apple isn't forcing them to charge, say, half the price in ibooks over all other channels which would give ibooks a pricing advantage and likely lead folks to use ibooks and not some other source
Now Apple is abusing its power and we the consumer loose out big time. Either prices go up across the board. They pull it from Apple and because of the lag time no one else made something to fill the void. Basically no matter how you cut it the consumer looses.

You are making some rather large assumptions. yes some apps might pull out or raise prices. Then again they could just be playing hardball. Especially folks like Rhapsody. They can just as easily take Flash on their website and make it work in Mobile Safari and keep making their money. Or they could say "you know, we don't like it but you folks asked us to just give in so we are" when in fact the fervor is all blow to get their names out there and they intend all along to 'give in'

Netflix is on more than just computers and iOS so folks that use anything else will certainly stay on the website. And netflix might argue that iOS can only use streaming so that's the only plan they need to support via apps so if you want discs also you will have no choice but to switch to the site.

And so on. In the end, perhaps some folks will raise prices because they want to and this is a good excuse to blame it on someone else 'forcing' them. Others will test the waters first.

And the little guys that couldn't afford to set up their own system have been using itunes already so it won't matter to them
 
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marksman

macrumors 603
Jun 4, 2007
5,764
5
I did find it amusing the other day when Daring Fireball reminded me that Amazon actually offers content subscriptions on the Kindle and has for a while.

The funny part about it is two part:

1) Amazon sets the prices for all content publishers. They don't even get to decide the price they want to charge for their content.

2) Amazon takes more than 30%.
 
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