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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

We have a very small, cheap, basic 19" black Dell monitor sitting in the kitchen at home. When a new iphone arrived recently, I stuck the sticker that comes with it onto the base of the monitor.

When an Apple loving friend came around I witnessed first hand the value of branding. She was entranced by this cool black Apple monitor and wanted to know where I had got it from. I'm pretty sure she would have paid at least $100 over the Dell price for such a cool Apple product. She was incredibly disappointed that it was a trick when she found out. The monitor no longer had any value in her eyes even though it was exactly the same as before.

Apple can charge outrageous prices for their products, and people love them despite/because of that. Can't understand why they'd stop making monitors.

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On first glance thats hilarious, but then it reminds me of the power of marketing and i get sad and worried about the state of humanity. Shit like this makes me wonder how we as a species has gotten as far as we have.

Bear in mind that brand equity is often earned. I feel that Apple have genuinely earned over the years. However, they now risk losing a lot of it due to the fragmentation of their ecosystem.

Maybe. I can't help but feel that Apple would have been long dead if iPod had not gotten USB support, and thus was usable on Windows.

Before that i don't think most anyone outside of USA even knew Apple existed unless you were interested in media production in some sense.

And that in turn lead to a feedback loop because certain celebrities would show up with an iPod (mostly noticed because of those white wires) because they themselves walk the media circles.

Similarly Apple could get the labels and studios to agree to distribute via iTunes because of that inside track in the industry.

And that in turn was what bootstrapped iPhone beyond being a fancy screened featurephone (though whoever talked Jobs down from going "nuclear" on the gray market jailbreakers was perhaps the true genius there).

But that all this then produce the effect that if you slap a fruit logo on a object peoples interest and appreciation is still worrying. What comes to mind is the comedy caricature of an "art critic" that can deliver a spiel of big words that means crap all upon closer scrutiny.

To be fair you can't just call it a "fruit logo". If you try to slightly modify it people will instantly recognize that it's not the Apple logo and it goes back to being a stupid fruit logo. So (of course) the point is not the fruit but the symbol.

I laughed at the Apple Premium Reseller chain on Gran Canaria the first time I saw it: https://i.sli.mg/lMkulH.jpg

You mention 1 experience with 1 person in your kitchen and conclude that this is how everyone behaves...

Another interpretation might be that 'people pay outrageous prices' because Apple's products are of higher quality/last longer, which makes the long term price lower than similar products of competitors; For example, i am still using an iPhone 5 (September 2012) which runs the latest iOS version smoothly...

Thing is in the case of a dell monitor, those are incredibly well built. Over built in some areas. I believe a sudden drop in interest in a product because its not a brand you expected despite clear positive qualities indicates a malformed attachment.

> those are incredibly well built

you know that because (i assume) you have the technical knowledge. Average people don't know which products of which brand may or may not be well built. But they do now that Apple products are generally of high quality.

The problem is in the case of zero-sum thinking with quality. "Oh that's not Apple, well it's crap" is ridiculous a logical fallacy.

Apple being of whatever quality has no bearing on the quality of anything else. Not only do other companies match, many of them exceed quality of apple.

A colleague of mine dropped nearly $3k on a personal MacBook Pro, then cancelled his order when he found out about the new touch bar. Then he started looking at other laptops that were good quality (we were suggesting lenovo X1s or dell XPSs) and he balked at the prices just above $2k.

"But these are considerably less than what you already had paid for a laptop!" -> "Yeah, but they're not Apple, and when people see Apple, they know you have a good laptop". That branding was literally worth almost $1k to my colleague...

I guess he was willing to pay the premium to not have to mentally sift Thinkpads from Ideapads and XPSs from Inspirons. With Apple its just one "brand", Apple. It is perhaps the greatest marketing asset they possess.

Also, resale values are typically very good. Even years after the initial purchase you can recoup much, much more than a Dell or Lenovo.

Why is this even a consideration?

Apple users seems to be the only ones that even care about "resale" of their computers, almost like they are investments rather than tools.

Because Apple hardware costs more. They're trying to make a point that it sorta-kinda doesn't, in the end, if you bother to sell the old stuff.

I upgrade my PC hardware by throwing away/recycling the old one and buying a new one.

I upgrade my Apple hardware by selling the old one on Craigslist and then buying a new one.

In both cases, I spend about $1000 net each time. In the PC case, that's +$0, -$1000. In the Apple case, that's +$1000, -$2000. Either way, it's -$1000 net.

If you prefer Apple products but think they're "too expensive" because they cost ~$1000 more, this is why people tend to disagree. They paid that ~$1000 once, as an "entrance fee" for their first laptop, but they don't have to pay it again.

Because I thought I saved money by buying Lenovos on paper at least as good as the Apples. Only to have a resale value of about $10 after 3 years when time came to buy a new laptop. (If the hinges etc lasted that long.) A Macbook is more expensive, but not only did it last me +3 years, I sold it for about a third of its original price, money I used to pay part of my next Macbook. That's why.

TL/DR - only Apple devices HAVE a resale value.

Enter my annecdata: I had to surrender my work MBP and got an XPS 15, supposedly one of the best non-Apple alternatives. Alas, here I sit, typing this on my 2008 17" MBP. Even though it has worse spec is nearly every way, it's just a much more usable notebook for me. TL;DR: The Apple premium is still [so far] worth it for me.

Anyone want to buy a barely used XPS 15 (top spec)?

Again, what I quoted from my colleague was his rationale. I don't know why people struggle to accept it (and find it amusing that my original comment attracted so much downvoting - apparently people disagree with me about the conversations I was present for...).

It wasn't about 'mental sifting', or 'flexy laptops' or any of the other excuses people will try to insert. It was about paying for the brand recognition. He'd gone 'wow' at my X1 carbon, and gone 'wow' at another colleagues XPS. But he balked on price because of brand recognition, not because "a single product line is easier to deal with than a choice, so I'm willing to pay almost 50% more".

I certainly agree that Apple's greatest asset is their brand reputation.

It's interesting to take your friend's reaction apart into two components. I don't think they were actually scared of spending $3000 for a laptop, since they were willing to buy the Apple laptop. They were scared, I think, of telling people they spent $3000 on a laptop, if it wasn't a "luxury fashion" brand laptop where that kind of price is societally acceptable to splurge on.

In other words: if you buy a $3000 gaming PC, you're a weird nerd who cares too much about computers. If you buy a $3000 MBP, you're a professional and a connoisseur. Your friend wanted a $3000 computer (probably because, to be frank, they are a "weird nerd" who can put $3000 of hardware to good use), but they didn't want to be labelled as such.

I guess people are a bit in denial about the fashion brand aspect of Apples. I've got an Air and a Lenovo X201 and partly switched to the Air because I got negative comments about the Lenovo's looks - "that thing looks really old" etc. Both laptops work fine.

That or he doesn't want a laptop made of flexy plastic.

I don't know if you read my comment or not, but a core part of it was talking to my colleague about his desires in a laptop.

Brand value isn't just a "name", it's built up by a reputation of durability or usefulness.

Apple products generally have a high resale value like BMWs.

>Apple can charge outrageous prices for their products, and people love them despite/because of that. Can't understand why they'd stop making monitors.

My guess is that there's just not enough profit in it. Monitors last a really long time, and while people like your friend will ooh and ahh over them, that doesn't necessarily translate into sales, and since they don't need to be replaced every year, they won't have the built-in profit that their phones have. It's probably the same with their WiFi access points.

With their WiFi access points I suspect it's because WiFi gear gets overheated and break down. (Probably fried capacitors.) I have given up on Apples' and other premium gear WiFi because of this. Now I just purchase 3 new cheap WiFi routes every 12 - 18 months and throw away the ones I have.

I have another Linksys "premium" home router ($200-300) but the WiFi died on that too, but it lives on as an OpenWRT home router but with WiFi disabled. The Apple WiFi routers also lived on for a while with WiFi disabled but acting as TimeMachine backups. Then the disks died and I couldn't be arsed to pry open the case with a hair drier to get at the disk inside and replace it. So for my home, the setup went from Apple all-in-one combo gear with routing, WiFi and backup disk, to specialized functions for WiFi (cheapest off the shelf), routing (openwrt), and backup disks (standard NAS hardware). (For TimeMachine.)

I hope my 15" Macbook lasts for a really long time, because when it's dead I don't know if Apple has any Macbook I want to have. But that's tomorrows sorrows..., no use worrying about that until the time comes. (I guess I can always fall back to Linux and some PC laptop.)

You might want to consider investing in some better gear, like some Ubiquiti APs and a proper firewall appliance (e.g. pfSense or a Ubiquiti firewall as well). For not much more than the cost of your 'premium' home router, you could buy 2-3 APs and a firewall appliance and have a much more reliable configuration (or at least, less to buy when something dies).

I did invest the time and money in a pfSense, but that's WAY more complicated to configure [correctly] than my old and retired AirPort Express. I really can't blame "normal" people for not going that route and I'll join the crowd pining for the Apple that was.

OpenWRT IS a proper firewall appliance and will run on just about anything. I basically have your solution in place already...

OpenWRT is a good-idea firmware running on consumer-grade hardware which almost definitely can't deal with what you're throwing at it.

Just beacuse you paid a bunch of money for it and flashed it with a better firmware doesn't make it good hardware, and custom firmwares often have poor support (and, on more than a few occasions, worse performance) than the default firmwares optimized by the manufacturer for the specific hardware they have.

The fact that you have to keep buying new hardware tells me that you have lousy hardware and should step up to proper hardware rather than expensive consumer-grade stuff.

Yes. Or you know, keep replacing the parts that break, the things with WiFi i them. These run stock firmware. The one with openwrt is now for routing and firewall only and works fine. (Wifi disabled, Ethernet only.) A benefit to replacing wifi gear so far has been to keep one step ahead of the neighbours in the wifi spectrum. Gets crowded signal wise downtown.

My random cheap MSI wifi router is about 10 years old, been on all that time.

My work expensive Cisco access points are so reliable I've never seen some of them in 10 years (they're above the dropped ceiling)

What you call "premium" is in reality just overpriced consumer gear. Ciscos enterprise access points happily sustain 5 years of thorough use without an issue, but they cost more than 300$.

(I typed a reply to this but it doesn't seem to have been saved....)

What the heck are you doing with your WiFi gear to have these problems? I've used all kinds of cheap-o routers over the years, and never had problems with them overheating. Are you living in the desert without A/C or something? My current router is just a cheap TP-Link dual-band I got used on Ebay; it runs DD-WRT and has been working fine for 1.5 years hiding behind my sofa. Before that, I had a cheap Cisco/Linksys e1000 I got used and ran DD-WRT on for probably 3 years. I gave it away to someone, and last I heard it still works just fine. Before that I had some D-Link I think, which I replaced because a firmware update prevented my network print jobs from going through (obviously not a hardware problem). I've also had (about 4 years ago, for work) a Cisco/Linksys dual-band which worked great, and a Cisco enterprise AP which was very reliable though the IOS UI was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. Honestly, your post is the first time I've heard anyone complain about WiFi routers having overheating problems.

Maybe I'm luckier because I usually run DD-WRT and set the transmit strength a bit lower, but I've only done that with the last couple of routers.

I don't know really. I live in the same country you do. Maybe you could class my closet with a PC and a Mac Mini for remote compilation as a local desert of sorts. It gets pretty warm in there.

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