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Read other letters about this article
It works for them.
"Personally, I believe Apple is being greedy about its hardware profit margins and snobbish about its products although they lack basic features."
I don't think you can actually make the vague charge of "greedy" against any major corporation. People are paying these very high margins and feeling good about it. That is definitely a reason to keep doing what you're doing.
Until your market share goes down, that is. When their share drops below their targets, they'll have to decide whether lowering their prices will increase or actually decrease their sales. Part of that is the "country club" economic model. That is, if people want to feel isolated from the hoi polloi by paying for a first class ticket, you might as well charge them double - they're paying for the privilege of paying, and because others won't or can't.
Encouraging snobbishness is key to this model. To get people to pay exorbitant margins, you have to make them feel somewhat dirty and smelly if they don't.
And that model's been with us a long time, so it's nothing new. Neither is marketing small computing devices to women by making them look like lipsticks. Or giving computer models names that sound more like lipstick colors.
In the case of a first class section of the airplane, though, the guy who pays $300 extra for a glass of brandy and 4 extra inches of space for his butt is directly subsidizing my seat in coach. It's hard to see how Mac users giving Steve Jobs more money than his machines actually deserve benefits anyone other than Steve Jobs.
Do the Mac people realize that once they switched processors, Macs really *are* just PCs now, only with a different bunch of software?
I think Mac users should push Apple to sell the OS in a form that will run on a stock Dell Vostro or other cheap machine. From their standpoint, it should be the best of both worlds.
