smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

There has been a recent trend of late that suggests suspending good sense, logic and reason is the order of the day.

I believe an example is in order. Tony Celeste writes:

Does Steve Jobs have some secret business vision that none of us can comprehend, or has he just reached the point of being so successful that he’s taking his most devoted customers for granted?

No, he is just a man¹ running a profitable business that releases new products from time to time.

Whilst there can be many points on a products life-cycle, the two most spoken of tend to relate to product launch and the end-of-life. There is a growing school of thought that Apple has started to take advantage of it’s early² adopters and that maybe that is a little unfair.

Part of being an early adopter is the knowledge that, in return for being the first cab-off-the-rank, you get your product now. There is always a cost associated with that decision. Whilst the early-adopter spending spree will obviously help Apple to succeed, it isn’t the only dollar that counts.

Equally, if you are the penny-wise sort you’ll wait until the very last moment to acquire exactly the same product which, being far closer to end-of-life, will often present a cost reduction. It also has some advantages if timed with a new product release. Again, that too is a risky venture as "upgrade pricing" is seldom an iron-clad guarantee.

Most consumers sit somewhere in the middle, where the desire-to-acquire is semi-balanced by the knowledge that the wallet isn’t an endlessly egg-laying golden goose. It’s also where a good percentage of unit sales fall.

When the iPhone was launched, early adopters were warned that the mobile market is an oft-violent battlefield, where competition and pricing can create a very volatile mixture. Things change, and occasionally they can change extremely quickly. If you bought early, you new you were paying top dollar and sooner or later, the price would drop.

Apple has not held a gun to anyone’s temple demanding they must purchase. We choose when to buy. We thus have to live with those consequences. Don’t like them Apples? Don’t buy the goods.

As predicted, the price dropped³ in very short order as demand massively overtook even the most non-conservative Apple figures. And the very people that were perfectly happy to spend in excess of US $600, retroactively decided they didn’t like the deal after all. Despite having the "revolutionary" product in their hands for at least two months.

Now, on the eve of Apple’s OS X Leopard release, we have the typical negative, knee-jerk and retroactive disagreement of terms being expressed by those who have purchased of a new Mac recently, despite a lot of warning regarding when Leopard would ship. With respect, if the product was good enough to pay the price then, what has changed to make it less valuable, now?

Even with the recent iPhone price changes, lessons simply do not seem to have been learned:

With the release of Mac OSX Leopard just around the corner, many customers that bought a new Mac in August or September expected a free upgrade, or at the very least, a special upgrade price for Leopard.

Expected? I believe the correct term in this instance is "assumed". There were no free upgrades when Tiger released. At no time has Apple hinted at, stated or otherwise suggested any form of rebate would exist other than very recent orders — in-fact that is a new deal this time round, at least based on what happened last time.

When tiger was released in 2005, the single user upgrade was $129 US, irrespective of when you purchased it’s predecessor. At the time, sentiment was that Apple was circling the drain and that Tiger, whilst a breath of fresh air, couldn’t save the company.

Two years later, the single user upgrade price is still US $129, or as little as $110 if one shops around.

How quickly history is forgotten, or strategically ignored, when it rightly points out the childishness of recent comments, supposition and mooing from those who should know a great deal better.

Such focus would have a better result in previewing what the upcoming release will provide, or not provide, rather than trite assumptive reasoning.

1. with very good market and product sense, granted (↩)
2. and now it seems, just-too-late (↩)
3. granted perhaps a little sooner than most expected (↩)