Touching the back wall of the Apple store

> We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands.

The secret being, of course, that they're not actually luxury goods. Like many things at the mall, it's a high-margin doodad sold to people in the proverbial impulse aisle of life. Dippin' Dots, knock-off watches, Build-A-Bear workshop - all in same vein of "looks expensive but is cheap to make" no different from the iPod.

I think the American shopping mall is one of the things that helped me contextualize Apple's brand identity. Apple does good marking in isolation or on a screen, SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls. It's the marketing that people respond to, not the value of a good.

I largely agree with you, but I think one of Apple’s secret sauces (and they aren’t the only one) is that while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.

The iPhone or your equivalent Android device truly is one of the most useful inventions humanity has ever created, especially for the era that we currently exist in.

Smartphone hardware is almost completely useless because of the software. At this point it's pretty obvious that the potential (but unrealizable) utility is just more of the luxury illusion they're selling.

Regardless of your argument and I do mostly agree with it, I do think that most things referred to “Luxury Goods” are, in fact, the ”high-margin doodads” you are referring to. At least colloquially, things like Chanel perfume and Luis Vuitton are exactly what you describe, and by most people’s definition, “luxury goods”. (I did not downvote, but notice you have been. I suspect it’s mostly the Apple Army aha)

I’m genuinely curious what your view on the unrealized potential is! I would love something new to hack on.

Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.

In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?

> while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.

Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did.

Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.

Kind of a counterpoint?: they weren't luxury, but they were higher-end. Newer tech, more metal... I didn't have an ipod in this timeframe (got a 2nd gen iPod touch in 2009), so instead had a half dozen cheap, plasticky, LCD, low-storage MP3 players.

> SF Pro looks very stunning and the Apple logo is chic and simple. But so is the Cartier logo. And the Rolex storefront. Or any of the other genuinely valuable things sold at malls.

If you're against the idea of selling things that are cheap to make at high prices by relying on branding, you might not want to call Cartier or Rolex products "genuinely valuable". Jewelry is not fundamentally expensive.

It's a social problem not a technical one.

The few among those things that even reliably function are covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them.

The illusion is that you're getting a computer and not a collection of knickknacks and appliances.

I don’t agree at all. Neither is Rolex high utility, nor is anyone fooled that an analog watch which sets you back 3-4 orders of magnitude more than digital/smart watches should be higher utility.

Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.

I don’t believe there is any product that is functionally equivalent to the iPhone while being much cheaper.

All of the cheaper options make pretty significant trade offs. Ones that you might not care about, but that others do.

The same can’t be said for a Rolex where the much cheaper options are better in every way other than flexing.

Almost none of those things have ads on the iPhone. All of them function reliably.

Rolex is not high utility, it is harsh environment. Real Antarctic expeditions, mountaineering, pre-GPS flight and navigation, SCUBA diving, sea navigation, desert navigation, etc. You could rely on your Rolex not to be the component that fails and gets you killed or lost.

Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.

I think it is the lack of a non-touch keyboard, not a social problem.

I have an Android phone with a physical keyboard and it is a totally different mindset when you can "check in" and communicate with the device/through the device without constantly checking/fixing the touchscreen/dictation errors.

Great! The fun thing about social problems is that you, yourself, can make routines and picky-preferences in life to avoid most of them for yourself! You could start today by taking away HackerNews from your routine - as well as other platforms and sites that perpetuate behaviors that meet your criticisms.

If you do, you'll find that you'll stop feeling the need to project your scorn for the things you voluntarily surround yourself with!

I don't buy this argument at all.

Apple stuff has always been expensive, yes, but it's not "luxury". You get what you pay for. Apple products are the best in their category, despite the surprisingly organized hate machine that has existed forever.

> covered in ads and defects to the degree that you're better off without them

Someone is deluded, and it's either all of the people using these apps despite being worse off due to doing so... or it's you. (And we're talking about actual utility apps, not something that you could dismiss as a dopamine trap.)

Yeah I actually don't own a smartphone at all. I don't know why you think I shouldn't talk about them after making that decision though.

Well, usually. There have been some absolute low-quality fiascos like the whole butterfly keyboard thing.

But one thing that really stuck with me was a few years back when I was making a spreadsheet of standard tech choices available for new employees for a startup, and almost all the Linux or Windows laptops out there that I could trust to last out of the box as long as a (non-butterfly-keyboard) Macbook had a baseline of 1080p screens, with upcharges just to get to 1440p. It might be better these days, but I felt like I was taking crazy pills just trying to find a certain baseline of quality for tech that would be getting used all the time every day.

I mean, you're getting advertisements in your iWallet.. so...

Firstly it's all very intentionally coupled together. There are strict rules around how the UI and notifications are used specifically so that they can sell your attention.

Secondly I think the only thing I really miss that's particular to smartphones is the map. Everything else is either a dumb gimmick or actually bad and all of it is to just get you're attention so they can sell it.

I regularly notice bugs when using iOS Mail; one that springs to mind would display one email's body with the header info from another email, it seems to have recently been fixed but was easily reproducible for weeks if not months.

Nice, now please do you have anything to say about the $1000 monitor stand?

Well, with that in mind, have you noticed the problems you speak about going down in life? Was I right about the core of what a social problem is - and how it can be fixed?

You're 100% correct to talk about your criticisms still, but you read as if it was still a problem in your everyday life, so I gave a suggestion more apt to that scenario. It didn't translate well, I apologize!

Except mechanical watches fail all the time. The sapphire glass shatters, or a strong impact disrupts the movement, or a user doesn't screw down the crown and water enters the device. They require expensive regular services.

Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.

Apple products have intensely overengineered insides that are (single-digit) years ahead of the competition in performance and security. Giving them that high margins causes engineers to do enough work to keep up.

It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.

If you don't want notifications you can just turn them off.

You don't think it's useful to know what time it is? Where does "Rolex is not high utility" come from?

I'm not as that was US only but yes that was outrageous and hopefully never happens again.

It feels almost like there’s this weird game that laptop manufacturers are playing to find something to skimp on with their models. Might be the screen, the screen’s antiglare coating, keyboard/chassis flex, input device quality, port placement, cooling capability, noise, maybe something else entirely, but it’s almost a rule that some aspect of the laptop must suck. Even the best reviewed models out there have some more-than-papercut flaws.

Screens have gotten better thankfully, but now the thing is to use screen panels that are only practically usable at 1.5x/150% UI scaling for some reason. It’s better than being stuck with those horrid 1366x768 TN panels that used to plague laptops, but it’s still more annoying than panels that can do integer scaling well. Given the choice between 1.5x panel and its 1x decent resolution counterpart, I’d actually prefer the latter just because it’s less trouble.

I feel like you're saying something like,"That expensive painting is inferior in every way to wallpaper, which covers the wall more effectively and durably, at a fraction of the cost."

The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of -more expensive materials -better finishing -superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)

The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)

> the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase

and you keep a phone 1-8 years but a car 3-20 years or 4x as long? seems like a bad ratio

That comment has a typical HN form: agree with the parent poster, but make an unnecessary, arbitrary new distinction so that you’re acceptably argumentative.

Rolex may have historically been a tool watch, but nowadays it seems more of a watch for tools.

Are you arguing that luxury is in the cost of production, rather than the quality of the product?

In the modern context, no. At least not from a watch. The parent offers a number of applications where timekeeping can be critical, but even when the Casio came out there were likely more functional alternatives to even the cheapest Rolex (a piece of jewelry).

It had been a while since I worked in a business adjacent to jewelry, but at the time the notion was that for a brand like Cartier or Tiffany, the precious metal/stones account for 10% of the selling price.

What was the business adjacent to jewelry?