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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

It's a tough position. Do they also go after countries where subsidized plans aren't common by making a cheaper iPhone (Europe/India/etc)? The iPhone 4 which is 2 years old is still around $400 unsubsidized. Or do they try to keep high margins and let competition (which lets face it, is Samsung) dominate those markets.

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“The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.”

You know, maybe Google is the best thing that happened to Apple if you think about. If the iPhone owned the world it would make Apple very lazy which over the long run would be terrible.

nic try but..

Cook+Ive+Schiller,Cue,etc. >>> Ballmer.

Talk about damning with faint praise.

Not in total profit earned they're not. He beat Steve jobs too.

Steve Jobs big plan was to sell a computer for under a thousands dollars, given that macs used to cost over two thousand dollars in the "monopoly" years. And it was not only accomplished on the Mac platform when he returned to the company, but also on the mobile platform by releasing a computer less than five-hundred dollars with the iPad accomplishing Bill Gate's vision with Origami(1).

1) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/origami_umpc_clunker...

Apple rarely competes on price. Their business model(s) for the last decade has shown that at least (Tim Cook may be different). But they tend not to be fans of low margin markets.

Not completely sure about this. After all, they did release the iPad mini, and before that, several variations of cheap iPods like the nano and shuffle.

Generally speaking, they target lower-end price points by releasing models with stripped down features rather than discounting the fully-featured products.

I completely agree with your statement, but what is the alternative? Dell? Look at most PC manufacturers based in the United States and they've been completely decimated by the race to the bottom in prices. I'm not a fan of Apple's pricing but I prefer that they make a profit and continue hopefully producing decent products.

I believe that Microsoft and Intel are going to face the same margin issues as the price of hardware continues to fall and manufacturers question the cost of the O/S and Intel CPUs.

Subsidized plans are common enough in Europe as far as I'm aware. It's just that you've also generally had the option of buying the iPhone outright.

Fwiw I think the 'cheap iPhone' option has been the iPod touch.

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