The real prices of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
I am not suggesting that removing the power brick doesn't have any impact on the environment. What I am suggesting is that I don't buy for a second that it was the primary motivator for removing it. My guess is that the primary motivator is shipping cost. This has a tangible and significant impact on their profit per unit and that was the driving factor. The fact that they could spin the removal of this device as a painstaking decision they toiled over because they wanted to save the sea turtles is really just a PR spin and was a happy coincidence that they could use.
And all those tangible cost savings thanks to the removal of this accessory... not only have those savings not been passed onto the consumer, but they actually increased the price!
Do you have access to the BOM? Sure it was likely a cost-savings measure, but it may have been to combat rising prices elsewhere. It's a two-sided equation and we can't see the whole thing.
If Apple did want to be environmentally friendly though I would think offering a reasonably priced multi-device (4-ports?) charger would be more effective than just selling a single-device charger separately.
One charger for many devices for many years is a better story than "It's the same charger, just purchased separately now."
That said, the AT&T/Verizon giveaway/deception is absolute garbage.
> That said, the AT&T/Verizon giveaway/deception is absolute garbage.
Absolutely. :)
The deception though is claiming that new new phone has all these new goodies with the same price. This is effectively all these new goodies with $50 increase in price ($30 career, $20 charger).
But yeah, definitely boosting margins on the older phones.
Did Apple increase or decrease their profit per iPhone on this round? Y'know, I have no idea. I do know that trying to come to a conclusion about it on the basis of not including a charger and headphones is impossible.
Take a look at iPhone SE's price before and after October 13th.
I'm personally happy about the lack of charger, all my Apple ones go into a drawer never to be seen again.
On it’s own that doesn’t mean much, but plenty of people dislike USB-C from personal experience.
Thinking about it, the best common data connector for interment use might be those credit card chip readers. They can handle more connections in a week than you need to recharge your phone in years. Sure they eventually ware out, but that’s in a business setting.
Every single Lightning device I’ve owned still connects as if brand new. The only people I ever seem to hear criticize Lightning are people who don’t even own Apple devices.
In my opinion, the form factor of USB-C was a massive mistake (even before considering the nightmare of competing cable incompatibilities) and they should have gone with the form factor of Lightning.
I've had my iPhone 11 Pro Max inside a Apple smart charging case since day 1, and for the past few months, the connection is really flakey, either one of the plugs is going bad. And its never left the case, the port looks very clean (no dust)
I've been exclusively iPhone since the 4S and its gorgeous retina display lured me away from my beloved Curve 8900. I am still not as proficient a typist nor as productive a person on the go as I was with my BlackBerry back in 2009.
(I did however ditch my rMBP years ago but I don't see how that could factor into a discussion about Lightning ports.)
I'd say that's a good compromise given the relative costs of a phone vs a cable.
That said, my Nokia 6.1 had the USB-C port fail in just a couple of years. Apple's design for the USB-C ports on their laptops looks extra nice and durable though. They are machined out of the aluminium of the case itself.
So despite the apparent solidity of the machined shell, something in the system wears over time.
USB-A has proven remarkably good, despite the "insert 3-times" problem, and it's now fairly large size.
Lightning is ok -- I have found that cables lose their "snap in" ness after a while, the arcing limits the connector lifetime, and I've snapped the tongue off a few (cheap) cables.
USB-B Micro has been pretty good for me, despite the "insert 5 times" problem.
USB-C has advantages of "insert-once", and smaller size, but (in my one-off anecdata) can have issues with losing its snug-ness over time. I thought it was notable, since it was with a MacBook -- so not something badly engineered, or cheap, or whatever.
I guess my view is that it's not a panacea, and arguably, on a par with things it's replacing.
It's the defacto standard for charging any kind of electronic device.
This is easily accomplished at the store and a good retailer could run with the idea to differentiate themselves for a low cost
Why would everyone just take one when they have perfectly functioning charging cradles, docks, clocks, and travel accessories?
I have a 5-port charger on my desk which charges all my devices and organises them neatly. When we go travelling we have a USB charging bar which plugs into mains and provides half a dozen 2.4A USB ports. We don't need vendor-provided chargers.
I expect a vast majority of the market is in a similar position.
The only people who would take the free accessory are those that need one, or have a compulsion to acquire free stuff because it's free.
Forcing an ecosystem of about a billion devices to throw away all their cables and accessories isn't environmentally responsible, however you want to spin it.
It is responsible, and the sooner the better.
Stop the waste now.
Unless the cost of a powerbrick went up by $50-60, there are savings that Apple is not passing onto the consumer.
1. Qualcomm Modem is at least $8 more expensive than Intel according to last court filling. And generally inline with industry expectation of its BOM Cost. Those numbers were for 4G Modem. And I would expect 5G Modem to be even more expensive.
2. mmWave isn't Free. I am very surprised Apple put mmWave inside iPhone 12 as well.
The problem with Multi Port Charger is that it is very Un-Apple. What happens when you charge a MacBook and iPad Pro at the same time? You now either expect customers to add up their Wattage to see if your chargers fits or design a multiple port charger to include this scenario, and if you include Apple's normal accessories margin that Charger is going to be insanely expensive.
So it is better to leave it to third party to do it. Apple will just recommend you to use their own charger.
Come on....
Everyone (to some approximation) has a charger already!
Why knock the people trying to reduce waste?
But it's a different phone with different components? Are you expecting that the price should otherwise be exactly the same? That's never what happens that's not a reasonable assumption.
> considering that very few people probably have a USB-C brick designed for charging iPhones
This is not a truthful statement. It can be charged by Lightning, which plugs into any USB-A charger. Anyone buying an iPhone has that.
iPhone SE is still $399
Was it sold at a loss before?
Do you know any of these things?
Which means that people will through this cable in a drawer and use their old one (if it still works properly).
One reason I loved getting a new iPhone was getting a new cable, charger and headphones since my old one's were usually beat after 2-3 years. So this is a huge pain in the wallet, as well as inconvenient.
Nonsense. I have tons of USB-A to Lightning cables. They cost dollars.
> since my old one's were usually beat after 2-3 years
What on earth are you doing to them?
But if you don’t like apple’s cables, buy a replacement from the supermarket or corner store. They cost less than a cup of coffee.
And cheap USB-A Lightning cables are crap. Even expensive ones from Anker are crap. Apple made ones are okay, but have poor strain relief, so eventually they crap out too.
Some background on how Apple "detects" their own charging bricks:
https://learn.adafruit.com/minty-boost/icharging
However, for USB-C, I'm sure any charging brick will do.
They are clearly stating what does and does not come in the box at the price. They clearly state the price. You either think what comes is worth it in the box or you don’t. They could exclude the power adapter while simultaneously increasing the price by $200 per unit. If people do not like it, they won’t buy it.
I don’t understand why there is this expectation that something is “owed” to the consumer market. If this was a bad decision on their part, and it drives a lot of consumers away from their products, it will show up in their sales numbers and they will course correct. Sort of how they did on their Mac keyboards.
My guess is that no one will care about the missing power adapter. I certainly don’t. If it increases their margin, good for them. If it is offsetting increased build expenses elsewhere, fine.
Also I would imagine $30 on a $700-$1000 device doesn’t really move the needle for most buyers. My sales taxes on that device will add up to more than that.
Because price gouging is immoral.
If Apple was on the margins financially and needed to raise prices to stay in business, that would be one thing. Apple, however, is replete with surplus assets and is taking hard-earned money from other peoples' pockets simply because it can.
There are an awful lot of far more economically productive uses the proceeds of Apple's defacto price increase could be put towards instead of further enriching Apple senior management and shareholders.
Wealth and income both have a decreasing marginal utility.[0]
[0] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin...
So... you've already got compatible earpods? What's the problem?
The old SE had a headphone jack, so no.
Yeah, but I could always use more for various places around the house, travel, one or more inevitably getting lost, etc. And haven’t they in the past few years started bundling better chargers than those lame 5W ones they used to bundle for the longest time? Wouldn’t mind getting one of those and ditching and old 5W one.
Maybe it was sold at a loss before! Who knows.
You're the one claiming the contrary and accusing them of something based on it - you prove it if you want to accuse them of something!
It is more dishonest IMO to allow Apple's claims to go unchallenged, given what we know of their history.
Have they claimed this?
If not for Snowden we wouldn't know this. How many other governments and Corporations are getting data?
Maybe we should strive for something better than pure capitalism, though?
I feel like Steve wouldn't've let this happen... the UX is just so, so bad. It feels incredibly profit-motivated.
This is the type of thing that is done because (many) someone's bonus is tied to some profit margin kpi, and they figured out the cheapest, most direct way to do it, customer be damned.
Tech people's continued assumption that they're the only ones who aren't total troglodytes is ridiculous.
If I were king... the phone would be sold “bare”, but for $30 less. If somebody needs a charger or cable, they can use that $30 to buy one. Instead, Apple remove the charger, includes a cable not compatible with most iPhone owner’s existing chargers, increased the price $30, and tell me it’s to save the planet? GTFO.
(Really, I’m not nearly as annoyed as I probably sound, I just hate the inconsistency)
I won't be getting one of these phones, and I think the VZW/AT&T giveaway is garbage. But I don't mind not having another power brick for my next phone. I already have plenty of lightning cables sitting around and ways to plug them in.
The new free included cable will let me charge my new phone* from my MacBook, something I currently cannot do!
* I don't actually plan to buy a new phone, but hypothetically.
Numbers from 2018: 217M iPhones, 5M laptops:
Nobody needs any more chargers, and if you do, they’re a fiver. It’s a preposterous waste that needs to stop.
(Totally separate from the issue of whether Apple is making money on this, which they undoubtedly are.)
(And yeah, if I bought this phone, I'd have a couple USB-C chargers but no cable though would probably use USB-A/wireless charging anyway.)
I've bought exactly 0 phones with 0% battery EVER, and I got my first phone in -97.
It seems like electronics used to ship uncharged because partially charging NiCad batteries harms them, and shipping fully charged batteries is dangerous. Nowadays, Lithium batteries are typically charged at 30% capacity before shipping. Lithium batteries were sometimes sent uncharged for some period of time in between.
Source: https://mobileaccessories.ventev.com/learn/do-i-need-to-char...
There's probably someone like that, and they can buy a charging brick. The rest of us can do without the 300,000 tons[1] of e-waste per year these amount to.
This incentivizes people to buy yet another Apple accessory. That and margins are the real purpose. One more foot into the Apple ecosystem.
What is that based on? The vast majority of iPhone buyers are existing iPhone users and will not need the brick. I have 4 bricks and cables in a drawer right now and I don't need them at all because I have a Qi wireless charger on my nightstand.
Most people will not need the brick.
They raised the price $130. iPhone 11 was $699, iPhone 12 is $829.
Apple slipped in the "mini" at the old price point, but it's a smaller screen.
How long will my next phone last? At least 5 more years. Probably longer. Spread over 5 years the price is fine, and I’d rather buy something that’s designed to last (and remains supported) than buy a series of cheap phones that get ruined or ignored every couple years by software updates. (Looking at you, Samsung). If my phone lasts 50% longer, a 30% bump in price is reasonable. Even if I don’t use it that long, I can make that money back on the second hand market when I upgrade.
The Verizon 5G presentation and the opaque pricing are real head-scratchers.
Why include Verizon at all? They are in last place in the US on 5G deployment and 5G is going to be largely meaningless for most consumers. So to have Verizon out there and then act like 5G is a huge deal says to me that they felt like they did not have enough to talk about with their new phones. It is faster, the cameras are better, they redesigned it, but it is kind of a mashup of the old design and new design, nothing revolutionary. They went hard on 5G because it is all they really have new to talk about. Verizon was needed filler and likely signed some kind of co-marketing deal to be on stage. I would expect a lot of iPhone-centric Verizon commercials over the next year.
And as far as the subsidy, I think it is fine to have carriers subsidize phone costs for their consumers, but $30 is peanuts on a $700+ phone and not worth any confusion or ill will generated by those who thought they were getting an unlocked phone for $699 as advertised.
The environmental stuff is a nice bonus and excellent PR.
3G: 3G!
3GS: Speed!
4: Retina Display!
4S: Siri!
5: 4G!
5S: Touch ID! 64bit!
6: Finally bigger size! Also, Apple Pay!
6S: 3D Touch! (groan)
7: Dual camera!
X: Face ID!
Xs Max: Even bigger! Dual Sim!
11 ProMax: Triple camera!
12 ProMax: 5G, Lidar!
5G is meaningless to a lot of people, yours truly included, and will most likely stay meaningless for a couple years at least, given the tiny deployments and the minimal speed advantage. But it's a big deal so it had to be one new model year's gimmick. I'm happy we got over it, so maybe next year they'll have to come up with something I actually care to buy.
There it is, the phone without a charger is the offer, you know it, I know it. We all know the price and the product.
There's no mystery here. This stuff about if it was a hard decision or not, I don't see how it matters. Folks who take this kinda of marketing to heart, I just don't get it.
How standard are these usb-c bricks and are people going to be worried about cooking their phones? (Apple's chargers are of pretty high quality, but it seems weird to plug a phone into a usb c device that can charge a notebook).
Also I feel that the headphone ommission to save the environment would be more believable if they weren't selling $100 wireless earbuds without replaceable batteries.
Much like "Reuse your towels in the hotel" is as much about saving the hotel money as saving the environment.
I love using the same charger for my laptop, phone, and tablet. When traveling I only have to carry one charger.
Chargers should be sold separately, they tend to last longer than a phone, cheap ones are dangerous, and people buy phones, the chargers just come with because everyone sells phones with chargers.
Apple is big enough to shift out of that equilibrium, by pulling the good-ol' reality distortion field and encouraging everyone else to stop bundling chargers on environmental grounds. Which grounds are actually valid, though not the actual motive in play.
A world where chargers aren't included is better than one where every manufacturer feels bound to bundle one in to every single phone purchase. So I think Apple is doing a good thing here, just like when they were the first to stop including floppy drives.
I can't for the life of me see the relevance. Sealed phones aren't an industry Nash equilibrium, they're a good design that users and manufacturers both prefer.
There are also no ecological grounds whatsoever to prefer user-replaceable batteries. The fact that it requires a few professional tools and some patience is irrelevant: when the battery stops holding a charge, it can be replaced, and this happens routinely.
Really? I used to routinely replace batteries in my family's phones. Now they're more inclined to get rid of an otherwise working phone since I no longer have the skills to keep up.
And the battery is usually the first thing to need attention as a device ages.
Optimistically I think that's just the process of rethinking everything and retooling every single industry and changing deeply ingrained consumer habits to tackle our enormous environmental problems. This "marketing spin" in the iPhone 12 keynote is a commitment that paves the way for truly environmental friendly products, behaviour and legislation.
I’m overflowing with USB-A to lightning cables. Apple bundled USB-A to lightning cables with their wireless trackpad and keyboard even after they dropped USB-A ports on their laptops. And if you don’t have any, they cost like $3 from the supermarket or drug store.
I’m going the other way. I think my phone charger is one of the last USB-A chargers in my house, and it’s days are numbered. I love being able to throw my laptop charger in my bag when I travel and charge all my devices with the same brick.
My only real concern is first time phone buyers. I think Apple stores (online or in person) should ask if you need headphones/wall charger when you purchase and just include a free set if you do.
They won't mention you can get a 23W usb-c charger for $12 from Ikea, they'll sell you the $39 Apple one.
If every phone that is shipped must come with a charger, but half the chargers are never used, then the marginal value gained by customers from the manufacturer improving that product is also halved.
So why bother making the charger good? Half the people won't use it! They'd have to pay for something that's not a direct benefit to the product they do want to buy: the phone.
This is one of the reasons the chargers that come with typical electronic devices are so bad. So very very bad.
They're big. They're odd shaped. They can't be plugged in side-by-side. They're heavy. The don't provide much power. They're inefficient. Etc... Some are downright dangerous.
It's a race to the bottom where noone wins.
Here's the thing: I like the "fancy" chargers Apple makes. They use very advanced technology such as gallium nitride circuitry to miniaturise their chargers. They're tiny, yet powerful! They don't get hot. They're light. They're safe.
But I only need one or two, but only when travelling. At home I need none because the IKEA power strips have USB charging ports built in!
I'd much rather concentrate my dollars into a couple of really good chargers instead of a bunch of mediocre chargers that's forced upon me on a one-to-one basis with the number of devices that I own.
Also: I haven't used a wired charger for my phone in about a year. Why include a wired charger if the customer has a choice of charging technologies? Should Apple include both a wireless and wired charger? Should they include a car-kit too?
No. This is the point of standards: it lets you mix and match components at will instead of getting a fixed combination.
Except apple doesn't use standards. They use their own proprietary ports.
Apple has been pushing for the interoperable USB standard for as long as it has existed. The original iPhone was either the first phone to charge from USB, or at minimum the first successful mass-market phone to do so.
The Galaxy Note 5, released in August of 2015, used a MicroUSB port. I think we'd both agree that is a premium Android device, and clearly, "standardized on" USB-C did not happen "long before".
In fact, Android only introduced support for USB-C in 6.0, officially released in October 2015:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C#Software_support
So I'm quite sure your memory is faulty, on that one.
Given that the specification for USB-C was only finalized in August of 2014, I'm confident your statement about Windows laptops is equally off base.
However, how am I supposed to use a laptop with _two ports_, one of which will be consumed any time I am charging.
I go over that on my laptop all the time.
Some reviewers are guessing that iPhones will drop the wired charge port entirely at some point, so will become a moot point.
And as for squeezing customers, switching away from the Lightning port would "squeeze" quite a few iPhone customers with lightning cables and docks and such strewn around their house.
I just wish Apple had included a puck-type Qi charger and cable in the box. Could have kept the box pretty slim.
Actually Apple is pretty standards compliant, sometimes excessively so. I have no illusion that they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but the idea that they "don't use standards" is a canard.
For video they long used open standards (DVI, Displayport, HDMI, now standard DisplayPort over Type C); they were one of the first to adoptt USB (much to the gnashing of teeth on the part of previous apple owners), the iPod originally used firewire; and lightning when it came out was the only insert-either-way connector (apple was on the USB board that designed Type C, but lightning predates type C) and now they use Type C (much to the gnashing of teeth of various parties). Their wireless chargers are Qi compatible, though their devices aren't :-(. Their USB implementations long required quite compliant devices rather than windows' "just install a flaky driver" leading to "hey this USB thingie doesn't work on Apple".
I had hoped this year they'd ditch lightning for type C on at least the high end phones but no luck.
On the software side, especially when they were the underdog they were quite standards compliant (image, music, video files, PDF, RTF etc) and are responsible for removing DRM from their music store. They didn't roll out their own formats until they were in a stronger position but have retained support for most of these old formats.
The original iPod was FireWire-only. The 30-pin dock connector was developed to enable USB and FireWire connectivity as well as docking.
* I refuse to follow Apples pretentious (proprietary?) refusal to use the article “the” with the iPod and the iPhone.
It's surprisingly hard to find photos of the old connector; here's one: https://regmedia.co.uk/2011/09/27/ipod_1.jpg
(I do still own an original iPad too, and use it)
On the other side the 30pin device connectors and the active thunderbolt 2 cables are pretty crap and play in to the proprietary and expensive meme.
Source for that?
As far as I am aware GaN has yet made it into any of the Apple Chargers. ( And I really I am wrong on that )
The CEO of Anker (they make chargers and charging accessories) estimates that 1 year of smartphone sales leads to 300,000 tons of e-waste from charging bricks. This matters way more than speculations about shipping costs. Have you seen Apple packaging? Nothing about it is light or cheap.
I really hope other companies follow suit.
With all due respect, this isn’t insightful; it’s asinine.
The iPhone 12 is a completely new device, yet you’re acting like they took the existing product, removed a piece from the box, and jacked up the price. When planning this new device, the designers were constrained by a cost budget for both the bill of materials and manufacturing. By not including a charging brick, those designers had extra headroom in the budget, and neither you nor I have any idea what this headroom was used for (or to be fair, if it was used at all). They may have had even more extra headroom than the nominal cost of the brick due to increased shipping efficiencies driving down overall costs further. 70% more devices per pallet (if I remember the figures correctly) is no joke!
I’d argue the most likely scenario is that if the charging brick had been included, the price would be $10-$20 higher than it is, for a device that many of us already own five or more of and have no use for. Your assertion that they’re simply pocketing the difference is to be frank completely unfounded.
I think that was the figure they used and it was more of a spin. ( Unless Flight has changed in recent years ) They were already flying at max load before the packaging got smaller. I did a calculation on HN some months ago and expect may be 30% increase in shipment unit due to weight saving from box, charger and earpiece.
Pretty Decent, but not 70% as they did like you to think.
There are so many industries that get into shady territory: rental cars ("facility use fees"), hotels ("resort fees"), internet access ("mandatory equipment rental fees"), even SF restaurants ("SF mandate").
I'm saying Apple is wrong, and so are many other companies, and shouldn't we have fixed this with a law by this point?
Our government is down at the moment, and on-call has no idea how to resolve the issue.
Slaveholder states would have been perfectly happy for representation to be 1:1 for slaves vs. non-slaves.
It's only after the Civil War and into the Gilded Age do we see the rise and acceptance of large scale corporations, but not without conflict. Modern readers will be surprised to know that Marx was relatively popular among Americans in the west during his lifetime (among those that read, naturally), certainly in part due to the increasingly corporate focus that the American economic system was taking at the time.
> The mechanics and tradesmen who became the foot soldiers of the American War of Independence represented themselves as producers of the wealth that they saw the British crown as looting, and after the Revolution, many turned the same language against would-be capitalists.
> When US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, for instance, he included the following lines, which, radical though they seem to a contemporary ear, where really just a reflection of the common sense of the time:[189] “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
> In 1880 a Protestant “home missionary” who had spent some years traveling along the Western frontier reported that: “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx”
The narrative that the government was always broken or in the control of corporate interests takes away agency and responsibility from individual citizens. It may be mostly true, but there's enough glimpses of when citizens were able to corral these interests that it's worth not giving up on.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act
Unless you are implying every state is down too :)
The state approach is more fine-grained so a negative outcome is localized, and if the outcome is positive people in other states can enact similar laws if they want.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/20/college-students-get-hit-wit...
That's a dark phrase.
Flights were more expensive, but the business was sustainable. Now you have airlines like Norwegian Airlines where you could fly from an out of the way airport in NY to London for less than long-term parking.
But they closed that down a couple of years ago (Thanks Boeing). Now the only route from NY to UK is JFK to LGW, but the flights were still so cheap (and hopefully they don't go under) that my wife and I always upgraded to their "premium economy" which was still only $1200 round trip NYC to London, and you get leg room, 2 checked bags, and guaranteed overhead space.
Voting is answering a direct question. Yes or no with direct results. Your purchase isn't like that, they're not votes. Business behavior is decided by what is more profitable. That also assumes there is a choice to be made. There's nothing you can do if all options behave the same way.
Your vote doesn't matter if the two options you vote for are the same. Often not true for politics, frequently can be true when making purchases
This assumes that agents in the market are rational actors, which they are not. Even when deception becomes the norm enough fall for the lower advertised prices to make the tactic optimal, despite the tactic's negative impact on marks and savvier consumers' alike.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Just because it happens, doesn't mean it is not a big deal.
I have an eye doctor appt this week and I literally have no idea if it's gonna cost me $50 or $500.
https://www.aarp.org/money/credit-loans-debt/info-2019/dispu...
This makes a lot of money for powerfully connected companies, so don't expect it to change anytime soon. This is why our congress and mass media treat Medicare For All as a joke or something to attack politicians on even though it's popular with a majority of Americans.
On top of this, my friends who work at (private, non-general) hospitals work a lot and are not paid what someone on HN might expect for what they put in. This isn't even necessarily ownership vs labor, since afaik the hospitals themselves are not usually in the best of places financially.
To me, the short version is: can't easily negotiate, information asymmetry, and captured regulators. Imo, this isn't helped that in USA we say "healthcare insurance" but what we mean/want seems to actually be "healthcare subsidy/guarantee".
[1] https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/whats-the-latest-on...
It's a complete mess that we need a uh, universal, solution for.
But in the rare cases when someone does genuinely need it (e.g. your house and all of your possessions burn down, you need treatment for cancer, etc.), it prevents financial ruin.
A catastrophic event would be something like you get run over by a car and have to spend weeks in urgent care racking up a six figure bill. Of course, such an event is highly unusual and the vast majority of people will never make a claim of that size or even approaching that size.
By design, people who don't make very much in claims pay for the people who do make those claims but also get the benefit of knowing if such an event ever occurred to them, they wouldn't be financially ruined.
> The insurance companies did the math to make sure they come out ahead no matter what you choose.
That's plainly false. See any true medical catastrophe.
Without that there will be no proper self regulating marked and all the points why capitalism is supposed to work will not uphold anymore.
As it stands, they win elections by catering to a very, very small slice that can bring them into power: Corporations. Their donations are a more sure-fire bet to winning elections than trying to win over regular people.
Price obfuscation makes it nearly impossible to do a like-for-like price comparison between two manufacturers. If the consumer isn't being hurt by these practices, then why do car dealership groups need to continue lobbying the government to uphold laws preventing direct-to-consumer sales? They know that open-pricing would drive competition and erode their middleman profits.
Not really.
https://shop.ford.com/build/f150
https://www.chevrolet.com/trucks/silverado/1500/build-and-pr...
The price isn't obfuscated. Manufacturers even publish nice tools that transparently explain their pricing model. The pricing is necessarily varied because the product configuration is varied.
Dealers are a whole different story; I agree dealer protection laws shouldn't exist, and manufacturers aren't really a fan of those laws either.
What's good for GDP is good for America!
Because the thing is, we can. Remember how in the early days of Expedia, flights were listed as crazy cheap, and then when you clicked through to buy, you discovered they'd tack on another 30-50% in fees and taxes? But that changed in 2012 when advertised airfares were forced to include all mandatory charges.
Why they don't do that with all industries -- the ones you've listed, plus making it so cell phone and internet providers can't start randomly tacking on new "network maintenance fees" and other BS -- is beyond me. It shouldn't just be airfare, it should be everything.
I mean, you'd think one of the political parties -- presumably Democrats -- would say, hey that'd be a popular move with voters, and make it part of their platform? But no.
for better representation and a better society, we need election and campaign finance reform asap. unfortunately that doesn't serve the desires of the politicians or the entrenched parties, so we need to get creative about how to realign those incentives.
It’s never going to happen, see Citizens United v FEC and the upcoming 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. This is most unfortunate, and will only get worse.
And that's just the beginning. In any modern country citizens would have access to things called "courts". Not in the US, not if you want to sue a business. In the US, courts have been replaced with "arbitration" where businesses have a heavy advantage. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbi... In what other modern country is citizens denied access to courts, when they have been wronged by a business?
Between the pricing reveal and the conflation of their 28GHz deployment as a standard 5G experience, it seemed like it was the iPhone sponsored by Verizon.
There’s no reason for Apple to sell out now, except for being a sell out. It’s a shameful look for Apple.
Realistically, its a pandemic where they already delayed production and apple probably didn't have anything else big finished to present besides typical camera upgrades and a new body.
Or apple-cynically, apple stopped innovating and the iphone is now just playing catch up to android blah blah blah.
You do need to pass certification tests, but those are set by governments. Those tests may be defined with lots of input from industry and may be executed by institutes created by manufacturers as a group, but AFAIK, those institutes are so independent from the manufacturers that they won’t let commercial interests affect test results.
The issue with the original iPhone was that consumers were used to get a ‘free’ phone with their subscription. To do that, manufacturers need to work with a phone company.
The iPhone’s success was not a given and Steve Jobs had fairly stringent ideas about pricing. That made it hard to find a phone company to work with. IIRC, AT&T was a bit of an underdog in the market. That made them fall for Steve’s offer.
MacWorld keynote, 2007, the CEO of Cingular is given the stage at 78m23s, in front of a giant Cingular logo. He leaves the stage at 84m23s, in front of a pair of Cingular and AT&T logos. So that's precisely 6 minutes on stage, out of precisely 80 minutes total.
In the 71-minute iPhone 12 keynote, the CEO of Verizon is brought on stage at 15m55s, and speaks until Tim boots him at 19m55s. So that's precisely 4 minutes on stage. Additionally, millimeter-wave 5G is given airtime, but says Verizon's product title for that a total of 5 seconds only.
ps. All iPhones offer carrier branding in the top-left corner of the screen when cellular service is active and control center is open (non-notch phones may not need to open control center).
My guess is either buildout commitments or prioritisation for iPhones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_USB_Mouse#Design_and_cri...
Just like the initial iPhone needed one carrier to get things right, 5G infrastructure testing will be like that.
It is in Apple’s best interest if their users experience 5G as best as the current infrastructure allows (which isn’t great yet, because it will take a decade for a full rollout).
It makes sense to have the carriers bend over backwards to see who gets to be the main partner for Apple, because they wouldn’t be able to manage 4+ relationships simultaneously with something as complex as 5G/4G flipping (this has to happen on device, because 5G drains battery 10x faster than 4G, so the device has to use bursts of 5G. If it handles this incorrectly, millions of users will complain of horrible battery life and that would be a big black eye for Apple, something they don’t want to risk).
Does 5G for T-mobile technically mean exactly the same thing as for Verizon? Probably not.
If anything it seems like Apple is doing the wireless carriers a favor by carrying the marketing water for 5G
The iPhone has been on a very incremental upgrade cycle for years now and people have been hanging on to their phones longer and longer. So the new iPhone's biggest competitor is the iPhone people have in their pocket. This is one of the few years where Apple gets to point to a big-obvious difference between the model years.
So the 5G dog-and-pony show serves Apple as much as it does the carriers.
If they can push ‘download local’ and it takes 1 second to do so, that might be an interesting thing :)
Also, 1 GB games that take 1 second to update will be nice.
/s
but actually you do need to be within a few hundred feed of the antenna to get "impressive" 5G speeds. I heard reports that during the build out at NFL stadiums, the antenna coverage didn't even reach the field when placed at the top of the seating.
OTOH, lots of dense urban environments have similar issues.
Likely your wifi, nic, or switching infra and even cables would be where I’d look other than your SSD.
Be that as it may, though! My Steam client is configured with with a background download rate cap of 1 MB/sec, and just a few minutes ago I noticed it downloading something and looked at the disk write rate, which the client also reports. Much of the time it's around 2 MB/s, give or take, but it can jump up to 5x, sometimes almost 10x that.
So I think you're right, something like a network installer slurping down at 1 Gbps could write saturate an SSD, not necessarily even a particularly slowpoke one.
I can assure you user will notice the lower latency even if 4G and 5G had the same download speed.
Verizon and AT&T offered Apple a lot of money and lower retailer margin.
There are only three cellular providers left and their networks are roughly the same.
Verizon most definitely paid for airtime on that keynote.
This dishonesty (plus the huge verizon plug in keynote) doesn't look like having carriers bend over, it looks more like apple bending over. Which makes no sense, apple could probably (almost) buy verizon in all cash if they wanted.
What's crazier, is that (in 2020) 5g is just not that important or valuable. So why is any company (except infrastructure companies) really putting in this much marketing effort?
Except for the rest of the world, which did just fine.
Apple tried to do US-like deals with European carriers and it was just so fundamentally incompatible with the European mindset that many people simply did not understand what they were trying to sell or why.
It took a year or so before Apple realized Europeans buy phones and subscriptions separately and the iPhone-sales took off, because now people could actually buy a phone.
If you look at how USers talk, the price with a contract is the actual price of the phone for them.
If I want to have a mobile phone, I need a mobile phone plan to go with it. What's wrong with bundling those services for a slightly lower total bill? It strikes me as pretty standard business logic.
Easy to say if you can afford a new phone up front...
https://www.verizon.com/basic-phones/?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D48197...
This is just a list of phones, plus how much extra a month you pay to get a phone with that plan.
This amount of money represents a 4% price difference at most.
That means that someone in Apple marketing decided that increasing customer confusion and reducing goodwill was worth a gain of 4% on some but not all of the phones they sold.
I get it - being operational is important for the success of the business. Considering every single detail from the packaging to the included accessories to the way the product is sold and priced is incredibly important. But it seems like Apple is getting into the dangerous territory of sacrificing customer goodwill over it. Buying an iPhone now feels like signing a contract for cable rather than something that’s fun and exciting.
Now most people will use their old chargers, which will not support fast charging.
Apple's customers are largely not lacking for purchasing power. That's why you won't see their quarterly sales tanking through this mess.
In the US, the iPhone buyers as an economic class have not seen a large and sustained unemployment spike, as they did during the great recession (which severely hit a broad swath of labor). Nearly all of the big job hit this time around has been absorbed by the working poor or lower middle class, people that work at hotels, bars, restaurants, in hospitality broadly, and other lower pay jobs that were similarly exposed to a bad hit by Covid-related closings.
Before iPhone was available Sim-Free and Worldwide. Apple had always been using the same marketing. iPhone starts at $199 with AT&T. The same headline without AT&T get printed all around the Internet and during the iPhone 4 era, even on local news and paper press.
And all these price are without Tax, which is something new to those from EU of other part of the world, where everything included in the consumer pricing. So by the time Apple started publishing its Sim Free Price, most around the world are complaining ( and God Damn it they still do today ) the US price and EU / AUS / CA / UK price dont make sense.
So this really isn't anything new.
Then there is mmWave, which is only available in the US iPhone.
Judging from the Pricing around the world, it seems Apple really did price iPhone 12 at $799. The extra $30 seems to be trying to recoup the mmWave margin specifically for US. And personally I would much rather pay $30 more for mmWave so I could play around with it down the road when it is available than to upgrade my Phone again.
(I also think it's a trivial thing to complain about, but I think that's going to be a much more controversial opinion!)
Every slide that has a price has the keyword "From" right before it.
I guess the new definition is "somebody can technically purchase for this price, even if it is 1 out of a million, and requires a blood sacrifice".
I am not a marketer, but I assume that is the definition they are using.
As soon as you select your carrier the price on the top of the page adjusts to $729. I noticed this last night when I was prepping my pre-order.
Cellphone pricing and cell carrier shell games are not unexpected. There are like 49 different ways to pay for phones these days and I don’t have the energy to tell the difference. The only thing that irritates me is the fee my carrier charges if I’m not paying off a phone at the moment that is equal to the amount I would be paying them if I used one of their payment plans for a phone.
I was also worried when I started reading that it was like $100 we were talking about, not $30.
For 15 years I bought nothing but Apple products and then kicked the habit. My bank account appreciates no longer having that addiction. Now that I have a clear head I can see the many ways they just suck more money from the Apple fans.
Seems like an anti-trust nightmare for Apple and the relevant telecom. I guess they figure they're in the green since the conspiracy is slightly trans-industry and not simply telecoms fixing telecom prices.
However, to me, it's still price fixing when AT&T and Verizon agreeing to fix iPhone prices.
Wheras on T-Mobile you pay 729, and then do not have an activation fee.
It is basically a scam, much like how hotels are allowed to charge "resort fees" to have lower prices in online search engines.
My understanding from the article is I cannot, I would have to exchange $729 (with Apple), or something along the lines of $30 with one of those carriers and $699 with Apple for a total of approximately $729...
> $699.00
> Includes $30 AT&T instant discount
> One-time payment
- Many people buy these on a monthly installment, so $30 can be 1-2 months of installment. (not sure which exactly I have not verified).
- From a Marketing standpoint the difference is $6xx vs $7xx pricing, which has a psychological impact. This is why a very very large percentage of prices end in .90-.99
- This seems to be the first time Apple has done this and it sets a bad precedent.
- More than the precedent, it seems Apple is willing to do this to derive a little extra revenue, which at least in my mind is a negative for their brand. So, it's interesting that they are OK with this.
- Based on this, In future, will they also be open to selling Data?? Who knows...
Are people really buying the latest iPhone on monthly installment plans? How much more do you pay for the device over the lifetime of the plan?
I'm still hanging on to my 2016 Galaxy S7 because it works great and phone prices seem to have spiked massively upwards over the last few years.
So, as I noted above, this adds 1 month of payment depending on the career.
I bet that they won't be milking the cow for so long.
And phones have long been advertised at a subsidized price in exchange for a long term contract anyway.
The price is subsidized by monthly discounts on a payment plan for the phone, but you can leave anytime and pay off the remaining balance.
You aren't an American television news network reporting on politicians, and you don't need to pretend that a mega-corporation told a cute little "fib". They lied. That's the word to use.
The problem that U.S. media has been having is that President Trump probably does not know the real answer to most of the untruths he says... he seems to say them without knowing the truth either way, and does not seem to care. Pretending to know something probably counts as a lie (it certainly should from the President of the U.S.A.), but the mainstream media has been uncertain of how to treat that. But it is an obviously different situation than with Apple telling people the prices they themselves set.
The end result is the same. Being intentionally misleading _IS_ lying, with the only difference being that the liar now has plausible deniability.
If there's anything at all that my life experience has told me, it's that this is actually the worst kind of lying.
NB: I don't have strong feelings about this particular instance, it just irks me when people grant a pass because it wasn't "technically" lying. Even though the intention was exactly the same.
Lies by omission are still lies.