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Comment by minthd | Hacker News Reader

That's a very interesting theory, but it's supported by very few examples, and the examples are pretty weak.

In the example of clothing and fashion - the consumer really buys buys psychological value(status, attention, etc), not user experience with his extra money, and i'm not sure those goods can be "good enough", because some have arms-race logic build internally(for example status).

In a sense, the same applies for the BMW - you could probably get as great car as the BMW , for much less , but the BMW holds important psychological advantages.

And as for consoles - i'm not sure we've reached "good enough" level of graphics for true gamers. When we'll reach that - it would be interesting too look at that market.

So yes, consumers aren't rational and for some thing you can never satisfy them, but i'm not certain user experience is one of those things.

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> the consumer really buys buys psychological value(status, attention, etc), not user experience

please explain the difference, other than what seems to be your pejorative value placed on psychology. Why would it be bad to want to feel good when using a piece of tech and prefer it over another piece of tech that is better on other metrics? Psychology (broadly stated) is the user experience.

I have no ill will towards psychology, but to my understanding ,user experience(as in "the way the product is designed") is a different thing from status, etc.

Ironically fast fashion is very much disrupting the fashion industry in a classic innovator's dilemma way.

> the consumer really buys buys psychological value

I think that's what the author is saying - businesses don't buy printers thinking about how the printer will make their staff feel, whereas when people buy iPhones, how they feel is a big part of the decision. The idea that I can afford to buy an excellent user experience for myself is very much part of that status value. Apple has exploited those feelings so that its design value outweighs the economies of scale that can be achieved by modularisation.

I think the important point is not that it just outweighs what can be achieved by modularisation, but that it is fundamentally more difficult to achieve using modularisation. Had that not been the case, you would expect companies that emulated the psychological value _and_ used the modularisation path to make more money than Apple would.

I think Apple's uniqueness is that it used the fact that it invented the iPhone and for quite a long time had the best user experience in it, to create a very strong brand, and even if android achieves similar user experience(some say it did in kitkat/lollipop, other say with large screen phones) ,Apple's brand advantage will still offer a huge protective moat around some segment of the population.

BTW, modularization is also supposed to offer faster time to market, and we've seen that with large screen phones and Apple's slow response to them(probably because it system was integrated ,hence harder to adopt to a different module).

The author missed that we are actually seeing significant movement towards modularization in video games -- PC gaming is/has been growing at the expense of consoles the last few years.

What do you mean when you say that you're not certain user experience is one of those things?

Can you define the "true" gamers?

Roughly, gamers("true gamers") VS casual gamers.

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