Eh, old hat. They’re just muscling into the luxury bag market where other luxury brands get the bourgeoisie and “influencers” to shell out $5k for a $200 handbag with a brand name metal plate on it. I mean if even “middle class” women can be convinced to shell out $500 for a Steve Madden bag then Apple can find some profit here. I have to say these do seem tailor made in many ways for teenagers who want to appear well off to their peers and who might scrape together enough birthday and Christmas money for these.
I don’t know, if this and other ways of soaking the rich and posers who need to waste money on luxury branding for appearances keeps iPhone prices and such steady and lets Apple make line go up I’m for it out of self-interest as someone who doesn’t want to spend more on smart devices (and if Apple raises prices Google and Samsung will happily follow). Because the alternative is either cost increases for the products which hit normal people trying to get by or more privacy invasion and monetizing data to make money.
Fact is in late stage capitalism we’re already at the point where a majority of profit in consumer spending comes from a minority of bourgeoisie, PMC, etc types while the rest struggle so things like this should become even more common.
spoiler
“jUsT bUy An AnDrOiD”
Either are valid choices. But let me point out some things:
Not any cheaper for any decent flagship phone, often more in fact for Samsung. Don’t last any longer, used to last a lot shorter with fewer years of support but better now. Out of the box less privacy and the only way you get real privacy is by installing alt OSes which only work decent on a couple of flagship series and are likely to drop support for those anyways in the near term because of Google locking things down even more and taking away the last crumbs of alleged freedom compared to iPhones because there’s no more market share to grab and no point in not doing so at the behest of the NSA/CIA/Five-eyes and their own monetizing of data and preventing app piracy. With Graphene set to launch their own phone maybe they’ll be a real competitor but probably not on price as you’ll probably pay $200-$400 more for the base model compared to the base model for a non-pro iPhone. I also think while Apple is certainly NSL compelled and probably has backdoors Google is the devil itself, funded with NSA/In-Q-Tel money from the very start, in bed with western natsec state from the very start, directly abets and profits off of the zionist genocide, buys and maintains facilities and divisions in pissrael, etc. No ethical consumption under capitalism obviously but Apple looks somewhat less evil than Google from where I am and at least slightly less of a threat especially on the AI privacy front. Their real rip-offs are things like this, accessories, dongles, and higher specced versions of their computers where they charge you an extra $1600 for $500 more of RAM to get to 128GB on a system while Windows system builders charge only $900.
Eh, old hat. They’re just muscling into the luxury bag market where other luxury brands get the bourgeoisie and “influencers” to shell out $5k for a $200 handbag with a brand name metal plate on it. I mean if even “middle class” women can be convinced to shell out $500 for a Steve Madden bag then Apple can find some profit here. I have to say these do seem tailor made in many ways for teenagers who want to appear well off to their peers and who might scrape together enough birthday and Christmas money for these.
I don’t know, if this and other ways of soaking the rich and posers who need to waste money on luxury branding for appearances keeps iPhone prices and such steady and lets Apple make line go up I’m for it out of self-interest as someone who doesn’t want to spend more on smart devices (and if Apple raises prices Google and Samsung will happily follow). Because the alternative is either cost increases for the products which hit normal people trying to get by or more privacy invasion and monetizing data to make money.
Fact is in late stage capitalism we’re already at the point where a majority of profit in consumer spending comes from a minority of bourgeoisie, PMC, etc types while the rest struggle so things like this should become even more common.
spoiler
“jUsT bUy An AnDrOiD”
Either are valid choices. But let me point out some things:
Not any cheaper for any decent flagship phone, often more in fact for Samsung. Don’t last any longer, used to last a lot shorter with fewer years of support but better now. Out of the box less privacy and the only way you get real privacy is by installing alt OSes which only work decent on a couple of flagship series and are likely to drop support for those anyways in the near term because of Google locking things down even more and taking away the last crumbs of alleged freedom compared to iPhones because there’s no more market share to grab and no point in not doing so at the behest of the NSA/CIA/Five-eyes and their own monetizing of data and preventing app piracy. With Graphene set to launch their own phone maybe they’ll be a real competitor but probably not on price as you’ll probably pay $200-$400 more for the base model compared to the base model for a non-pro iPhone. I also think while Apple is certainly NSL compelled and probably has backdoors Google is the devil itself, funded with NSA/In-Q-Tel money from the very start, in bed with western natsec state from the very start, directly abets and profits off of the zionist genocide, buys and maintains facilities and divisions in pissrael, etc. No ethical consumption under capitalism obviously but Apple looks somewhat less evil than Google from where I am and at least slightly less of a threat especially on the AI privacy front. Their real rip-offs are things like this, accessories, dongles, and higher specced versions of their computers where they charge you an extra $1600 for $500 more of RAM to get to 128GB on a system while Windows system builders charge only $900.