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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • This is undeniably hilarious, but if you’ve ever seen actual dissection photos or videos of surgery, you kinda recognize that good anatomical drawings required a lot of mental effort to create.

    Imagine making a completely accurate diagram of everything in a car’s engine bay, either while the engine is running and it’s doing 70mph down the highway, or after it’s had a head-on collision at the same speed.


  • We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers.

    And actually, the fact that the price hasn’t increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.

    Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?

    The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it’s that much.

    There’s tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.


  • The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/

    The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.

    The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US

    Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?

    And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don’t follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that Apple’s costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.


  • But here’s the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.

    Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.

    And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:

    Do you have a charging cable?

    Is it an Apple cable?

    Are you sure you have one that’s USB-C and supports USB Power Delivery?

    And it’s not worn out?

    You say your dog chewed on it a little but it’s mostly intact and still works?

    Well, I’d recommend getting a new one anyway.

    Yeah you can get your own if you want but it’s best if you get an Apple cable.

    OK great, that comes out to $820 total. And do you want to insure your phone for $5 a month?





  • Raise your hand if you think laying off employees en-masse right before an earnings call should be a crime punishable by death:

    ^(Only somewhat kidding.)

    Seriously though, this is is even extremely misleading to shareholders. It’s blatant manipulation of the numbers, how is it not illegal?