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Comment by topkai22 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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").

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