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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Apple isn't a charity. Do you take a pay cut when you have money left at the end of the month? Why not? Why not give that back to your employers?

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That's not an equivalent issue. Employees, like consumers, need their money much more than employers (or more to the point, senior managers and shareholders) need it.

Wealth and income both have a decreasing marginal utility.[0]

[0] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin...

Price gouging is immoral. Making a profit isn't.

The latest iPhone is not even remotely an essential item. 'Price gouging' as a concept does not apply, and you're watering down the term by trying to do that, which is dangerous.

You don't have to have an essential item to price gouge, though, you just need to charge more money than you otherwise would have to make extra profit. Whether the choice to remove the adapter in this iPhone was just for the profit margin can't be known for certain, but the fact that they removed it in other phones while keeping the price the same makes it seems like it was.

I don't think the definition of price gauging is simply 'it's a bit more expensive than I think it should be compared to what it used to be for this optional luxury item' - if it is then it's a useless concept and we shouldn't worry about it!

When you rise prices, you lose sales. When you drop prices, you gain sales. The market price is where a product of these two maximizes. You cannot make more profit by simply rising prices beyond the equilibrium point. That was economics 101 when I was taught it. Is that knowledge now deprecated? Or is iphone now an essential item?

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