i read an article on forbes the other day that kind of ground my gears but i
wasn't going to make a video about it at least not until several more just like
it popped up in my news feed the author wrote an opinion piece
mocking the 700 wheels that apple recently put up for sale for their mac
pro workstation as tone deaf a bad
product for consumers and as an expensive fail
the author contrasts the price tag with both the msrp of the mac pro itself and
an assortment of other apple products that you could buy for such a princely
sum finding it outrageous that something as simple as wheels to help your mac
roll away from you could cost so much i agree with all of that none of that is
what ruffled my feathers mr spence is right it's outrageous
but i think he's also playing right into
apple's hand by complaining about it let's discuss let's discuss how this
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this isn't a one-off the cycle has been going on forever apple does something
outrageous the community reacts with adoration or condemnation depending
which stickers adorn their bumper then apple takes all of that feedback and
changes absolutely nothing in the last five years alone we've been treated to
the following the solid gold edition first generation apple watch that was
ten to seventeen thousand dollars for a product that turned into a paperweight a
mere three years later when they dropped software support there was the picture
book that took eight years to create cost two to three hundred dollars and
served no purpose other than to market apple's products to visitors in your
home even we got in on the mockery that time around and let us not forget the
thousand dollar monitor stand 9.99 and
like the mac pro they'll all be available in this in the fall it's
like other monitor stands except that it traded basic features like swivel and
height adjust for more magic
all of these products were created to serve a number of purposes the first and
most obvious of which is to exchange them for money from people who want them
so for profit but the thing is with how
few of them apple would expect to sell that wouldn't be enough to justify their
existence to get to the root of why they are so expensive we need to go one layer
deeper something every single one of the products i listed has in common is that
it's the very definition of a luxury item quite literally nobody on earth
actually needs any of them
computer wheels for instance the mac pro cannot operate unless it is plugged into
the wall so even if you wanted to move it around while you were using it you
actually couldn't okay so mr spence actually touched on
this one in his article reason number two is that products that are as
unnecessary as they are expensive serve to create a perception of scarcity and
prestige that is incredibly valuable to consumer brands because the cold hard
truth is that apple products at face value are neither scarce nor prestigious
walk around a high school and okay it's empty right now because of
covid but if it wasn't everyone and their little sister would
be blue bubble texting away on an iphone
apple makes consumer electronics and yes
they are pricey but between the second hand market and carrier subsidies even
kids can afford one if they go without food or let's say a kidney for a little
while although i'm not saying i recommend either of those and here's the
deal if you want to stay cool as a status symbol brand it's important to
have products in your portfolio that most people really will only ever get to
see in the studios of influencers or in
a product placement on tv or by getting up off their butt and going to your
store these are called halo products let's use NVIDIA's titan line of
graphics cards as an example an rtx titan costs twice as much as a 2080 ti
while performing nearly identically and why not i guess if someone is enough of
a fanboy or is ignorant enough to give you more money than other people can
reasonably afford why not let them do it
but you're also not going to spend 3 billion
creating a product that will sell so few you'd have to sell it for two or three
times as much in order to justify that exhibit a here would be enterprise GPU
pricing so that's why the titan graphics card uses exactly the same GPU but just
has a golden shroud the third and the
least obvious reason that they do this is to make even the people who aren't
impressed by it talk about apple we all
know the expression there's no such thing as bad publicity that's because
even a negative article about their overpriced wheels serves to add to the
allure of the logo while even more importantly providing apple with free
brand exposure that they would have otherwise had to pay for
not only would that ad space in my google news feed have cost apple money
but it actually would have been far less valuable a properly constructed opinion
piece contains both a thesis and
balanced background information in order to support it and since mr spence is a
professional writer he provided me with some negative commentary sure but also
some positive points referring to the mac pro as a beast highlighting the
comparatively more reasonable price of 400 if you bought the wheels in the
first place and pointing out what a great value some of apple's other
products might be if you had 700 to blow
on shiny gadgets i mean good luck getting all of that information across
in one of your slick tv advertisements apple or wait that wouldn't be necessary
forbes and everyone else already did it for you yes sly fox and anyway the more
interesting question for me isn't why apple did this cause like i said earlier
this isn't a one-off but rather why they chose a status symbol mac accessory
rather than a golden iphone or something after thinking about it in the bath for
a while the best bet that i could come up with was that they just weren't as
worried about angering the mac community as the iphone one it's smaller for one
thing and it's already taken such a beating over the last 10 years that
what's one or two more insults
and this would be completely consistent with their attitude towards the mac pro
so far after the trash can apple obviously thought that mobile was going
to completely take over and they would never need to create another mac pro
until mobile didn't take over and people do still need desktops and they finally
cave to the pressure but they did it on their terms as we discussed in our
review they made no effort whatsoever to make the new cheese grater the mac that
you would have in your home like the g5 was before it it's just there as a
there okay we made it for you oh i'm glad that's over god
now we can go back to selling airpods type of product outside of a very small
subset of loyal users with big time hollywood budgets bankrolling their gear
expenses apple rightly seems to view the mac pro 2019
as an unnecessary luxury that they can sacrifice sales volume on in order to
maintain the illusion that they are a luxury brand when they are in fact a
consumer electronics brand because that's what they are again i know their
stuff is expensive but by contrast the
pricing for the things that anybody actually needs like
some way to listen to music on their iphone now that it doesn't have a freaking headphone jack isn't that
detached from reality yes they target the premium end of the market and there
is an apple tax but their gross margins are public information and they're only
making around 38 like they aren't marking their products
up nearly as much as actual luxury brands are or even other tech hardware
companies and they're nowhere near the profit margins of software giants like
oracle or facebook anyway the point of all of this wasn't to slam mr spence
forbes or any of the other people whose job it is to cover the consumer
electronics industry or even apple it just was to help people understand why
this keeps happening so that they can make an educated decision for themselves
about whether they want to send out that angry tweet about expensive wheels or
maybe just do what is actually the most destructive thing they can possibly do
to apple's business and completely pretend that they don't exist speaking
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watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe check out one where we totally
participated in all of this and made a video about their what was it called
table book like it was a fun video to make actually
though we threw that together in like an afternoon
hi my kids what can i do for you recess is over all right okay
all right i gotta go homeschool my kids see ya