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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

So should ASUS start selling their stuff in their own "ASUS Stores" only to bypass this? They obviously want to avoid imminent race to the bottom and commodification of their high-margin models (if there are any).

How does this differ from US-wide enforcements of MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) where even e.g. Amazon is fully complicit?

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Manufacturers generally don't want to be big in retail because that would require them to hold a lot of working capital as inventory. Apple is fairly unique in this regard because of the hefty price premium they command. eCom still works out because you can aggregate orders to the factory supply chain and that smoothes out some of the demand variability.

You can also buy from HP, Lenovo and Dell. Apple is not fairly unique.

Online though, they don’t have their own stores.

I think parent meant retail as brick&mortar. The ones you mention do direct sales, which is a bit of a different game.

Oh, you are right. HP products can be bought in stores though but indeed I can't think of any brick and mortars computer shops like Apple.

Don't forget Microsoft! They have indicated a total interest in brick and mortar skin in the game with all their surface stuff.

Ok, what is the address of the HP or Lenovo stores?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17602464

And even Apple does sell through retailers.

They could limit the sales to their own online stores, of course. That would severely limit their market share though, hard to see anyone purchasing for higher-than-market prices directly from a manufacturer. It's a clear case of wanting to have the cake and eat it, too.

ASUS has a store in Akasaka, Tokyo.

Source: https://www.asus.com/jp/Static_WebPage/ASUS-Store-Akasaka/

Stores can, and do, sell things below the minimum advertised price, so it really can't be considered price fixing (or really, retail price maintenance).

Whether that should be legal or not is another matter though.

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