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Comment by cprayingmantis | Hacker News Reader

The Mac Pro is worth exactly what people pay for it. If it sells then who are we to judge it’s price/utility?

I've always hated the "it's worth what the market will bear truism." We are all part of the market, we all get to contribute to the assessment of value.

As much as I disagree with apple's BS pricing, this take on the fundamental definition of market and customer is even less true. They literally didn't expect and count price sensitive buyers as their target customers, so no, you are not the market.

However, I agree with you that their business acumen is lacking, pricing at 25-50% over their best quality competitor would have vastly expanded the market, and their bottom line. But someone is advising them to be the Hermes/Versace of computers and somehow making business sense to decision makers, so this is what we get.

I’m not part of the target market segment, but I am part of the market. As another poster pointed out, I could buy one but won’t, depriving Apple of revenue. More importantly though, that truism is used to shutdown discussion of value and worth of products and ideas, Even though those discussions in fact actively changing the. We are having a public discussion of price, which may effect purchases of others. If a major publication published an article about how new Mac Pros were failing catastrophically with data loss, it would effect the general assessment of value of a Mac Pro and change the market, even if the author never purchased one.

If you're not buying, you're not participating in that market.

That's a very narrow definition of participation. Price setting behaviour includes the effect of non purchaser. Otherwise how do you know it's maximally overpriced? If you don't care about that lost market, sure. If you could have sold 1000x more at a lower unit cost and made more profit... More fool you for ignoring non purchase

The latter doesn't contradict the former. What the market will bear results from all the individual subjective value assessments of every individual.

Indeed the market is made of all people, each with their personal and subjective assessment of value based on their own personal/subjective needs, criteria etc. What a product is worth TO YOU is your decision alone… and totally subjective, and… statistically irrelevant to the market at large.

The objective value measure though that matters to the market at large is: for what price can you be certain to find a buyer (in other words: "what the market will bear").

Depends, i thought it's market share was dropping. But I can't see proof of it from latest months.

Statistics seem to agree till q3 2019. But don't know exactly why it wasn't after that.

i have this weird theory in my head that tim is allocating financials internally to either

A: save money and try to let a product die (mac mini, mbp, ipod)

B: invest to signal hope that a product is in fact not dead (mac pro, also mbp)

both approaches will eventually lead to an iphone-ipad-only apple because in case A things just fade away with the occasional life sign as to not lose too many customers.

case B, on the other hand, gives people what they were yearning for for years and keeps „professionals“ and press stimulated but at a ridiculous price point so that, b/c of low sales, the product line can finally be killed.

The new Mac Pro price points don't seem ridiculous compared to comparable workstations from Dell and HP, though, as as in the past, Apple's configuration options are comparatively limited.

The (wholly understandable) frustration with Mac Pro pricing seems mostly due (1) to the continuing lack of lower-cost, non-Xeon modular systems in Apple's lineup, and (2) sporadic upgrades leading to eventually overpriced systems (e.g., the 2013 Mac Pro ca. 2019).

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