tulkas

ugh, I hope HBO breaks their exclusivity agreement with Bell in Canada. Right now, it is impossible to legally watch HBO here without first signing up for either Bell's TV service or their own streaming service CraveTV and then you can pay extra to add HBO. Even if you are with Bell's competitor, Rogers, you need to first add Bell's CraveTV add-on and then add HBO. You have to agree to pay for an additional and mostly unwanted service before you are allowed to watch HBO legally.

Many Canadians want HBO but have no interest in also paying for Bell's streaming service on top. It's double dipping and it drives people to pirate who would otherwise be willing to pay HBO.

MacPro said:

No different to Google really, didn't those programmers that created Android v2 (i.e. the one they rushed out to copy iOS after they dropped their Blackberry knock off) get paid?  Those programmers being paid was a reward for tech theft just as much.

Exactly. Huawei is copying everyone. They are the new Samsung. Samsung copied everyone for many years. Android is unabashed copy. Windows was a copy of MacOS. Sure, Huawei is a little more James Bond about it, but Apple has been the target of IP theft for decades. 

It's always made me laugh when the haters bash everything Apple and then use clones of Apple products. It's like they are trying to clown themselves. 

Hope they don't think another 20% hike in prices will help stimulate sales. 

They lost price discipline. Ahrendts gained too much influence and appears to have convinced Tim that they could go full out fashion house pricing strategy “we priced super high so people that want spend a lot can”.

hopefully that’s a lesson Tim learns. Let Angela run the stores, let the professionals run the business.

Don't want to judge until Apple actually releases numbers, but this isn't hard to believe. Raising prices so much on the flagships like the X and XS can't help but turn some people off. It comes off as hubris and/or that they are trying to bring in LVMH type pricing for no other reason than they can.


Cook defending the massive price hikes with "we want to have a price point for every one" was ridiculous. Subsequently releasing a cheaper, cut down version was only ever going to add insult to injury. 

Apple maintained price discipline on iPhones for years and years. They were able to charge a premium price and yet not alienate their base. It seems they might have lost that discipline and have decided there are not boundaries. Slowing unit sales, in that light, would simply be expected. LVMH doesn't try to sell more than anyone else, just to make more per unit than anyone else. We'll have to wait to see how well the Ahrendts-effect works out going forward.