Apple sold high-priced computers all throughout the nineties and they were close to bankruptcy. Where were the alledged cult members?m0002a wrote:One of the points being made is that even if Apple makes very good products ("fabulous" is an overstatement), the reason they cost so much is that a large percentage of the buyers are Apple cult members and that drives up the price to higher than what other companies are able to charge for comparable products.
Then the iMac came. At a time, when just about 99% of the PCs in the world were beige boxes and the the other 1% were fashionably black boxes, their's came in tangerine and indigo blue and was transluscent. Of course, the flannel wearing nerds all over the world shook their heads on thought "who will buy this?". Well, turned out lots of people were into computers that looked stylish. (debatable, I agree)
The G4 Cube, the second generation iMac that looked like the Pixar Lamp, the Titanium Powerbook. They were all fabulous industrial designs. But no, for the average nerd who has as much fashion sense as Stevie Wonder, those could not have been the reasons people were buying them. Why weren't they paying more attention to RAM and Hard Disk size? Those people shouldn't be allowed to own a computer! They are, they are .... CULTISTS!
But once again, this is a free market economy and you can't try to tell people what they should look for to buy.
My girlfriend bought a car last year. She didn't care about the engine one bit. She didn't ask for ABS or ESC, mileage or service intervalls. She thought it was cute and she liked the color. And that was that.
Status and asthetics are two of the major secondary attributes of any purchase good. Why else would car companies bother spending money on a design team?So market acceptance of Apple products is not an indication of their actual value, unless one is selling status, etc (which they obviously are).
The overwhelming success of Apple products is proof that they sell the right product at the right price.