harteman":3ehngwkc said:
I'm surprised the price isn't considered in "the bad."
I have no problems with Apple products even though I occasionally find issue with the company itself, and the only hurdle I have ever truly found in my attempts to own an Apple product is the price. Considering the fact that there seems to be competitors to this product at significantly lower prices I myself have to say that the price more than anything else prevents me from buying this product.
To me that is "bad."
The two primary competitors are both selling their wares at cost (possibly at a loss overall). It is difficult to say what impact their actions will make on the computer hardware industry as a whole, not just Apple. I'm personally not convinced that Amazon and Google's "race at the bottom" is either healthy or sustainable. I expect to hear more labor horror stories coming out of China, Viet Nam, and (North!) Korea, as manufacturers are pushed to and past their break-even points and suppliers are pressured to bring in products at impossibly low margins. To me, that is very "bad", and I fully expect it to happen in the current pricing climate. I deplore what has happened at Foxconn, yet I can't help but think that it represents the tip of the iceberg, and that we're hearing of the Foxconn stories because conditions there allow the stories to get out at all.
I am personally much more comfortable buying a product that has some profit built into the price, where there is some room and hope for profit to be passed down the supplier chain and eventually for labor conditions to improve, even if that improvement is due to customers applying social pressure on the vendor in order for that to occur. There is zero hope for that when the vendor operates at or below cost, and constantly applies pressure to suppliers to shave margins ever thinner. And less hope for that zero-profilt vendor's competitors, who must somehow find ways to match that artificially low price or leave the market.
