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Comment by natmaster | Hacker News Reader

Fact: Knowledge or information based on real occurrences: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fact

Language is a convention, not a fact. You are entitled to your own conventions (but I'm going to use the ones others accept for the sake of this post), but not your own facts.

The fact is that if you have more relative profit margins than revenues, that more of the money people are paying you are not going to the costs used to produce the product. Thus, you are paying a smaller % of your money toward the product itself, no matter what value you place in having that product.

You fanboys are seriously rabid, and for the sake of this community, please learn how to defend things you like in a civilized manner (http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) as opposed to the emotional knee-jerk reactions you have. Or leave.

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I love the admonition to "stay classy" (not a quote) while you name call people as "rabid fanboys" with "knee jerk emotional reactions".

"The fact is that if you have more relative profit margins than revenues, that more of the money people are paying you are not going to the costs used to produce the product. Thus, you are paying a smaller % of your money toward the product itself, no matter what value you place in having that product."

Newsflash: none of this leads to your conclusion that people are paying for the "brand" as opposed to the product itself.

People pay more for good products and service and experiences and they also pay more for brands and some other things. Companies can also increase profits by cutting down on component costs, leveraging scale, with good recruiting, and good management in a hundred other ways. The fact that one product is more profitable then another doesn't imply any of these in particular. The fact that Apple is so much more profitable generally is taken of evidence that many of them are in play. Dismissing all of this as "paying for the brand" is just ignorant.

Leave aye?

What took you so long to presenting an actual argument? The reason I replied to your dubious claim at best, "In other words, you are paying for the brand, not the product" is because you offered no proof or evidence, you just made some random accusation.

How do you separate what profits are due to the successful product and those which are due to the brand? AdAge did say Apple is the most valuable consumer brand, but I'm pretty sure you weren't referring to that. You're saying any % more that Apple makes over x, x being the industry standard is due to Apple's brand, but Apple's products are commodities so it's not a fair comparison. Apple's OS/UI is usually where the added value comes from. It's a virtuous cycle, Apple makes good products, people trust them, so they can charge more than say Acer who doesn't have the same track record.

I'm not a fanboy, I use a Dell and a Blackberry, maybe you should stop making assumptions. I just prefer to have discussions, not flame wars, which is what you tried to instigate in your initial comment.

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