Why Apple is obsessed with gold: It's all about Asia | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple is obsessed with gold: It's all about Asia

mashable.com

31 pointsaltern856 comments

Take it with a grain of salt, but Jony Ive was quite adamant about why they created a gold watch - They (presumably he, marc newsom, and the rest of the design team) - love the material. We know they are among the world's greatest experts in building personal electronics out of aluminium, (check), stainless steel is a classic watch material (check) - so why aren't they allowed to build a gold watch just because building things out of gold is awesome?

I'm guessing the fact that gold is popular in China (Apple's soon to be largest market), and probably will yield a high gross margin, probably made it straightforward to get Tim to sign off on it - but I really do believe that the initial driver was the desire to work with the material.

But, put it in a different perspective - pretend that you are in charge of the Apple Design team for their next generation product, which is meant to be worn, and you want it to be attractive to everyone in the world - what materials would you chose to make a watch out of?

I don't know about you, but gold is pretty high up on my list.

One simple reason for not building gold watches is that we have much cheaper materials that are also superior in every way - except sex appeal.

A treatment for schistosomiasis (a common tropical parasitic worm) costs $0.50 per year. So for each gold watch, which costs something like $10000 extra, you could have gotten 20,000 years of parasite-free life for humans.

But rather than make this some annoying moralistic lecture, just ask the question: which is more awesome?

Spending ten grand on a gold watch?

Giving people 20,000 years of medical treatment?

So how much medical treatment have you bought for others?

Also, 20,000 years of medical treatment with 10 grand?

Do you meant "free aspirins" when you said "medical treatment"?

There's tooth surgery that costs more than 10 grand, for a single person...

I used schistosomiasis as an example because its effects and treatments have been widely studied.

"Research by J-PAL affiliates Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel has shown that school-based deworming is one of the most cost-effective methods of improving school participation." - http://www.povertyactionlab.org/scale-ups/school-based-dewor...

"50 cents per child per year for treatment which includes the costs for advocacy, transport, per diems M and E etc etc." - http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto/donate/faq

Still, that's not 20,000 years of medical treatment. It's doses of a specific drug.

And the people buying a 10 grand gold watch also buy tons of similar things: 2K shoes, 5K suits, 20K "modern art" paintings, 5K earings, 10K poker nights, etc...

Who I am as a person has nothing to do with the argument.

The gold-edition watch is made out of gold, but the other products (Macbook, iPhone, iPad) are simply gold-colored. Those offerings are purely for the market rather than love of the material.

I find gold to be tacky. If we are being silly, I'd much prefer palladium for a watch.

I've seen a gold stickered Ferrari in Beijing before, that is silly. A gold watch is mellow in comparison.

I think jewelry shows some signs of snobbery ("look at me, I'm wearing precious materials on my body! - Aren't I awesome?").

Looking at my mother's generation, they are still putting a high emphasis on wearing gold and such. But the kids my generations are a lot more interested in "technology". What I mean by that is they'd much rather get an expensive phone than a gold necklace, and brag about that instead.

So why isn't an "expensive" $600 phone snobbery? Because it's actually worth the cost in terms of functionality. A $6,000, or $60,000 "gold smartphone" would insinuate just as much snobbery to me, just like a $17,000 Apple Watch does, which is 100% identical in terms of functionality with a $350 one.

This is going to become even more laughable when we start mining billions of tons of precious materials from asteroids in a couple of decades and bring them to Earth.

I also find it extremely disappointing that Apple wants to turn from a "premium brand" into a "fashion brand". The two worlds couldn't be anymore different. Premium brands implies high quality for a certain premium price. Fashion just means paying $7000 more for a different watch band. I really hate to see Apple going down this trend, because it only means it will eventually start focusing less on the "technical quality" side of its products, and more on the "fashion side" of its products (kind of how Beats uses poor quality headphones and wraps them up in expensive "fashion" packages - which by the way, Apple acquired).

> But the kids my generations are a lot more interested in "technology". What I mean by that is they'd much rather get an expensive phone than a gold necklace, and brag about that instead.

You are assuming everyone worldwide from your generation thinks this way. This is a giant unfounded assumption.

I'm not sure Gold is the greatest material. It's actually very ductile but not at all resistant

"Because of the softness of pure (24k) gold, it is usually alloyed with base metals for use in jewelry, altering its hardness and ductility, melting point, color and other properties."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Modern_applications

While I've ever been entirely comfortable with this 'theory' (as true as it might be), it's worth noting that Apple Watch doesn't necessarily fall into this one.

IMO, the gold Apple Watch was created to position Apple Watch as a luxury good, and make the cheaper models more appealing and fashionable. Just the existence of the uber expensive Edition gave the Sport and 'regular' Watch more 'fashion cred' for those that would care about such a thing.

Why not both? Making an absurdly expensive gold flavor elevates the whole Watch brand, positions it as a luxury good, and makes it more appealing in China. Win-win.

I don't know. I've never thought of Apple as "luxury". I thought of them as "premium". Premium. As in pay premium for the best.

Positioning Apple as a luxury product isn't what I want or need as con/pro-sumer. I'm not sure where Apple are heading with this. Profit I guess.

You aren't the target market for a gold watch.

The gold version has literally no benefit over the aluminium or steel versions other than being gold. If you discount the value of gold, it's actually worse because it's heavier.

However, there are still people in the world who want to show off their financial status, and have the means to do so by wearing gold watches, jewellery, diamonds, pearls, etc.

It is a fact that many asian cultures embrace these displays of personal wealth. It's common practice in Thailand for people to display their gold items when other relatives/close friends visit their house.

As I said to a friend recently - I fully expect to see a lot more authentic gold apple watches in Thailand than authentic steel or aluminium ones.

I totally understand everything you've just said. That's fine.

What I'm trying to get at is how uncomfortable I am with the way the brand is being positioned. I'll pay top dollar/pound for quality/best-in-class/design products.

I won't pay to be a part of some luxury Apple branding exercise. And that's what this feels like.

I'm arguing this on a branding level. Sure, I can go an buy the $299 whatever-metal version of a Watch, and someone else can go buy the $10,000 version.

That's great. Everyone wins. In my view the brand suffers.

It becomes LESS cool.

The person paying $10,000 isn't paying for a chronological masterpiece ... a technical tour-de-force ... THAT is cool.

The person paying $10,000 is paying for a bejewelled version of what everyone else has. Sorry, boring and tacky and unexciting and has been done to death already by customizers. I don't want to be associated with that.

I thought Apple were "designed by Apple in California". Sounds like it might as well be "designed by Apple in Bangkok".

But it's cool, it's not important, I get that I'm just pissing in the wind really :) But I thought this kind of stuff was important to Apple. Guess it's not.

I see your point but it's ultimately just about personal preference - worry less about what's cool and use what works for you.

True, that's always the best bet and why, despite my admiration for the company, I have hardly any Apple products.

However, I find it interesting from a business marketing point of view. Apple had their marketing impossibly perfect over the last decade. This feels like a step away from that.

Cheers,

So this is a part of Apple's 'pivot' into a luxury goods maker, of which they've been making a whole bunch of hires of the past 12+ months for.

> Positioning Apple as a luxury product isn't what I want or need as con/pro-sumer.

Compare Apple Watch to it's 'competition' - the Moto 360 and the Samsung Galaxy Gear. One type of con/pro-sumer will be happy buying a gizmo and would buy either a Moto 360 or Apple Watch purely on it's utility. But Apple Watch is going to sell to a whole lot more people because it is a fashionable luxury good as well.

Even if no one buys it, Apple Watch Edition helps increase the luxury and fashionability of all the Apple Watch models.

I think that's point. I've never associated Apple as a "luxury" brand.

Luxury in my mind is never necessarily the best. I know that. Whereas before I almost might have automatically seen Apple as the best.

So for Apple to want to be seen as Luxury risks bringing baggage to their brand.

But again, who cares. They don't serve me as a single individual. Have a good one, cheers.

> Even if no one buys it, Apple Watch Edition helps increase the luxury and fashionability of all the Apple Watch models.

No it doesn't. The Apple Watch Edition by appearing on the wrists of celebrities and fashion designers helps makes all smartwatches less geeky and more mainstream but only the Edition is seen as luxurious. The aluminium Sport is now the cheap low class Watch in comparison to the fashionable Edition. Moto 360 (made with metal and leather straps) has no such connotation.

I'm still not convinced Apple had to go this route to appeal to celebrities and chinese, after all they use aluminium iPhones instead of gold Vertu phones. Many celebrities wear plastic Beats headphones and fitbits. I'm confused why Apple wants to turn into a luxury brand (besides the extremely high margins of course).

Short version: China !== Asia.

Long version: I understand that China is a big market for Apple, but as the headline indicates, it's not just China where people are more inclined to buy (and show off) gold products - it's a phenomenon in many Asian countries.

Asia pretty much equals China + India + a bunch of other much smaller countries. So if they said "asia", do they mean Japan where this might not go over as well, or India where gold is reserved almost exclusively for jewelry? Focusing on china instead is much more precise, even if the gold watch might be attractive in Malaysia and Vietnam also.

For the Apple watch edition, I doubt that Apple expects it to be a large revenue driver. It's an obvious marketing move to position the watch as a high end luxury item, to 'frame' the pricing discussion, and to generate buzz. This is a technique that companies (especially aspiration luxury brands) have used forever. Set the price of your A-level item unusually high and suddenly the price of your B-level item seems like a bargain. Where other e-watch makers are struggling at the $200-300 price point, Apple is selling its C-level watch at $350 and its (probable) volume seller B-level watch starting at $549 without any problem. I think they understand the human psychology of luxury purchase decisions pretty well. It's smart (and slightly evil), but I don't know how this will fit in long term with the rest of their products which are 'premium' but until now haven't pushed so far into 'luxury.' An iphone is slightly more expensive than an S6, but is perceived to be 'premium' in some way. Apple doesn't make diamond encrusted $10K phones even though their are luxury phone brands that do. This is new territory for Apple, not sure that I like it.

It seems absurd for consumers to store value with items that are very perishable. What do you do with your 10k watch in 5 years when Apple has stopped releasing security updates ? You're then left with an expensive shell and a rotten core.

If you are in the market for a $10k gold watch, you probably just hand it down or even throw it away...it is not the kind of money you think about (most high end watches are much much more than that...think 30k CHF for a simple one).

So much speculation going on here. Amy Hoy actually researched it (https://unicornfree.com/2015/nobody-will-pay-10000-for-an-ap...) and 10k isn't much for the kind of high-end fashion market that will buy this. In fact it is kinda low, as Amy points out the 10k will only get you the "basic bitch" version of the Berkin bag.

Basically a) you are not the market and b) for those who are the market here 10k is not much.

Side note I love Amy Hoys writing and suggest you all go read her site.

I found the evidence in the article to be less than persuasive. The cited study found black to be the most luxurious color in those markets but obviously there is no black phone or black edition variant. I'll also note that Apple has quite often historically used black without being accused of pandering to Asian tastes. No equivalent study for the west is offered as a contrast, probably because gold and silver would also be high on the list. The western designer cited as not liking Apple's turn to gold wears ... a gold (colored) watch.

I think it is implied that black is a favourite color in the west as well. So black devices is just pandering to everyone, which is why the white iPod was kinda revolutionary colorwise. Everybody else was doing black or dark devices and here comes Apple with signature white earphones and device.

It's not a coherent argument to say 'Apple is moving away from black/white because Asians associate luxury with gold' when your own citation says that 'Asians actually associate luxury with black to a higher degree'.

I also found strange the whole bit about 'white and funerals in Asia' which he promises more on later than later spends fewer actual words on the topic then he did on the promise to give more details lol.

It should be "all about Apple".

I admire the Apple design ethos, especially recently. It felt like they were trying to make the best product possible, whether I liked it or not. If you're telling me they chose gold just for Asia, that's pretty lame.

Personally I think the gold looks pretty tacky and a departure for Apple. I thought they made their own rules. Guess I was wrong. But what do I know, they'll still sell a quadrillion of everything. It's just a colour.

Happy Sunday

How can there be a "best product possible" without taking the prospective user into account? A phone that was so thin it sliced my finger, or so small that I couldn't see it, wouldn't be a very good phone at all. What Apple does really well is design products that very large numbers of people want to buy, and if there are a very large number of people who want to buy a gold watch, Apple will make it for them.

That's a little bit like saying: "if there are a very large number of people who want to buy a grey-PC-looking-box running Windows, Apple will make it for them".

Sorry, you're missing my point.

Apple used to position itself as a brand for rebels and bohemians. Remember the "Here's to the crazy ones" manifesto? An $18,000 gold watch is pretty far from that image.

Of course, the rebel image worked because Apple had a tiny market share at the time. But it's still pretty striking to see a company that built lime green laptops build insanely expensive gold watches.

>Apple used to position itself as a brand for rebels and bohemians. Remember the "Here's to the crazy ones" manifesto? An $18,000 gold watch is pretty far from that image.

For one, that was one campaign, run at one time. Not some constant image of the company. They also made expensive laser printers, PDAs and high end laptops like the Powerbook -- do those tie well with "rebels" and "bohemians" in the original sense?

Besides being just a project image, "rebels" wasn't meant in the guerilla activists sense, but in the "creative" sense in a western context, which can include having lots of money. John Lennon, one of the guys in the campaign was a billionaire with a Rols Royce. The greatest rebel shown was Ghandi, which was included mostly because people just know/focus on his "peaceful" and "spiritual" qualities. As for bohemians, these come into two groups. The actual historical ones, living in Paris, Lower East Side, etc, in decades past, usually poor, and the modern middle/upper class "bohemians" (bohos, etc) whose "bohemian" attitude includes consumerism.

>But it's still pretty striking to see a company that built lime green laptops build insanely expensive gold watches.

It's gold, it's supposed to be insanely expensive. Besides they also build a lot of insanely expensive laptops compared to cheap PC alternatives.

thought this was common knowledge when they unveiled the gold 5s in 2013.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/gold-iphone-5s-the-only-spark-a...

I have wondered if the riot-of-colour 5Cs were partly intended to appeal to certain Asian markets too, even if they don't seem to have done the business in China.

The riot of colour iPods were aimed at young people, so ot's plausible that the 5c was also aimed at younger people.

I figured it's all about Jonathan Ives.

He likes gold and it's particular aesthetic, which is why all the new stuff has it.

My completely uninformed opinion is that Steve Jobs probably hated it, which is why it never existed until post-Jobs Apple.

It's possible. But Jobs was apparently a supporter of the stitched-leather UI panels, and he wasn't above liking a bombastic sort of bling http://www.scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/980w/public/2... (source: http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1110728/steve-jobs-ya... ).

As someone who took up an interest in watch repair later in life, I now understand why the better watches are cased in gold. It doesn't corrode.(makes working on easy) It warms(thermal heat transfer) up to the skin quicker than, I believe any metal. Easy to polish. The negative, besides wasting money(unless the consumer feels the gold iwatch is an heirloom), is you can't wear it everywhere.(certain people look at my old gold sea master like they would chop off my wrist in certain areas.)

That said, when I look at the current gold Iwatch--I just think about the melt value. I can't think of any gold watch manufacturer who didn't produce a watch thinking the consumer could theoretically keep that watch for life, with the proper care. Sorry, about rambling on--I have just thought about this watch too much. I don't have an exciting life.

Melting the watch won't give you shit, even by jewelry standards, because the gold they use is very light meaning that it is technically of a certain karat while having much less actual gold content. It is great from a design perspective, it is light and strong and just as pretty, but not so good for material worth.

I really hope that they work to offload as much computation to the users phone as possible as more features are added so that one watch can survive multiple iphones.

Silver and copper both have better thermal conductivity than gold. They corrode, but they can be gold plated to prevent that.

If Apple is willing to make all of its product lines gold just to make China like it more, I wonder what else it's going to compromise on (thinking security/privacy here).

Everyone always brings up privacy with Apple.

Apple has a history of rejecting NSA blanket surveillance (until Jobs died- according to NSA leaks)

At the very least Apple has a business model that /can/ support user privacy. Google is an advertising company- what you don't pay in currency, they make up for by selling you.

Ultimately what privacy comes down to a lot of the time is how much information the companies have access to. Even if Google had the same stance towards privacy that Apple does, they would be inherently much much worse just because their entire business model relies on having tons of your data, which is the exact opposite of the way Apple operates.

You are suggesting that marketing to people's aestehetic preferences might come with a technical, functional or security compromise. How so? Would you suspect Ford to compromise on safety if it started to make a car in a color that appeals to a certain demographic?

Your example is interesting, because car color and safety are related :) The effect isn't strong, but white cars seem to be involved in fewer injury incidents per mile driven. Standard disclaimer about correlation/causality...

Come on, its not difficult. Apple makes products in gold because it makes those products more appealing to Chinese consumers. If you're going to try and be an Apple hater at least also try to be intelligent about it.

I'm not convinced Apple making a different coloured product is a compromise, let alone anywhere near the same level as security/private

it's a huge compromise, since no one outside of china would ever by a gold macbook.

Instead of Silver, Slate, and Gold for macbook colors, Apple should have gone with Silver, Slate and Green.

A few women might get a gold MacBook, but I think it's the tackiest thing I've ever seen.

It also sucks that they picked gold for the keynote and as the main image on the website :-/

I do agree this is a conversation worth having - it's not hugely relevant to Western consumers (obviously there's no deal to give all data to China or something - they're still a US company), but it raises points about Apple's philosophy.

They got the iPhone on China Mobile, the world's biggest carrier that is also owned by the Chinese state. They're allegedly set to make China their biggest market, and are making enormous profit there. It doesn't seem particularly unlikely that that deal did more good for Apple than for China Mobile or that there might be conditions attached to it. It'd be fascinating to hear what those could be.

I have mentioned this before, and somebody mentioned there's a markup on iOS products from Hong Kong which could suggest there's something to the idea - and that people do know/suspect something too.

You only have to look at the state of Android - specifically Google's version - in China to see something's up. Google have been locked out of China, Apple have been embraced. Of course Google have way more data to demand than Apple do - and perhaps the demands were so ridiculous Apple would have balked at the same - but it's an interesting comparison. It's also potentially the driving force that will mean Apple continue to take substantially all the industry's profit.

Basically, it would be fascinating to have been in the room of Apple/China Mobile negotiations.

How is offering something gold, or the color gold, a compromise? What is the largest cellphone market in the world? China.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_o...

Can you explain how you make the connection between colors and security? It sounds like a subtle troll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com