Hacker News Reader

Comment by dduugg | Hacker News Reader

Great job transitioning from buying Coke using Apple Pay to managing diabetes in ResearchKit. Vertical integration at its finest.

View on HN

If you were in charge at Apple, would you have made Apple Pay unable to buy a Coke?

That's a bit of a straw man argument. I would have chosen another product to highlight Apple Pay though. It's not just the irony in following it with a diabetes app, but that Tim Cook's predecessor had a well-know quote about selling "sugared water".

ah I didn't even realize you were referring to the video.

The link has since been updated, it originally pointed to the live stream. I can see how this thread (and probably a few others) doesn't make very much sense now.

Well, someday if you work really hard, you can make the leap from pundit on the Internet to making that call. In the meantime, can we make HN better and avoid making silly comments top voted? "Does anyone get the irony..."

Coke also sells water. Pretty funny though regardless.

Of course it does. Carbonated and flavored.

Well, they also bottle municipal water and sell it straight up (dasani[1] i think?). I certainly agree that the flavored water, being still sold as "water", is a pretty fucking awful trend though.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_States

Based on my rough calculations, at a 1,333,333% markup.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-...

$2.25 for a million liters of water? Wow, that is crazy. This really exemplifies the age of big-corp we currently live in.

This is actually an improvement, in that before this legislation it was free to bottle your own water in BC. This price isn't nearly high enough, but it's better[] than before.

The last estimate I saw was that Nestle was going to pay about $550/yr to bottle and sell our water back to us.

Intel is marking up sand at a couple orders of magnitude greater than this.

I wonder how much Intel pays for its sand.

Silicon ingots run to about $70-$200/kg according to Alibaba. I think I read that Intel buys their silicon from a specialist supplier rather than grow their own ingots.

Look at it another way: the incremental unit cost of flavours, colours and carbonation probably isn't much. So really, every bottled beverage is primarily driven by logistics, marketing and consumer willingness. I doubt water is any more profitable than cola.

The difference with plain water is it's pretty much a true commodity product; assuming free-market economics, if it really were feasible to lower prices it would have already happened.

And don't forget the "premium milk"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/02/03/coca-cola-cok...

Parks & Recreation made fun of "luxury milk" in a recent episode. It pains me to learn that they were parodying a real thing, not just making a joke.

(clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46iPFTCZ9LA)

I think I just premium vomited in my mouth a little. :(

It sounds to me like they're building an internal Truevault for managing patient data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com