The high price of Apple
Yesterday was an exception. I can’t remember the last Apple event where I came away actually quite annoyed, but there it was. In part, this was down to a lack of density in the keynote itself. Apple took nearly an hour and a half to announce a new accessibility website (which got only a couple of minutes), a new Apple TV app (only available in the USA), and a new notebook.
But mostly it’s about the money. The inference was Apple’s new MacBook Pro broadly replaces the MacBook Air, and yet the former is considerably more expensive. The new MacBook Pro – impressive though it is – also happens to be spendy for even professional users. And then if you’re British, Apple had another sting in the tail waiting for you.
People complained (and still complain) about the new MacBook Pro prices being a straight US Dollar to Sterling conversion. That’s not actually true. US prices are listed without tax. The UK’s have 20 per cent VAT added on. With Sterling bobbling around the low $1.20s, Apple’s UK pricing on new MacBooks is actually a little less than what you might expect – to the tune of about forty quid when I did the calculations last night. (Of course, given Brexit, a pound might by the time you read this be worth about eleven cents.)
What irked more was discovering Apple had quietly upped the pricing of its entire range of Macs in the UK, despite them not being updated. So not only do we get no new iMacs, MacPros and Mac minis but models cost about 20 per cent more than they did prior to the Apple Event.
Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall Apple doing this before in the UK. And I certainly don’t recall Apple doing the opposite during those times when Sterling rapidly rose in value (Please comment if so, and I will update this article.) On new units, rebalancing seems fair enough. These things happen (as Brits buying iPhones discovered with each tier being £80 high than 2015’s offerings). But it seems a bit rich to whack up the price of an iMac by three hundred quid, when the tech inside it is a year old.
What concerns me about all this is that my reaction isn’t nearly unique. I’m seeing a worrying number of industry professionals and home users starting to look elsewhere. Creatives were wowed by Microsoft’s new desktop/touchscreen system, and look at the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar less favourably. Moreover, everyone’s looking at the pricing, eyes darting across to broadly equivalent PCs, and thinking it feels an awful lot like the 1990s again.
Of course, this isn’t entirely down to Apple. Brexit has knackered Sterling’s value, and it’s now one of the worst-performing currencies in the world. Even so, Apple hiking prices of existing kit in the UK isn’t going to win it any new friends – and could lose it a number of old ones.
Apple definitely have changed prices on the UK store for existing models in the past (both putting prices up and down) but I’ve never seen such a hike as what happened yesterday. Didn’t realise how severe it was until I saw a post on AppleInsider:
“The Mac mini now costs £479, up from £399, while the iMac 4K is now £250 more expensive at £1,449. The iMac 5K has also seen a £250 bump (£1,749), but Apple’s three-year-old Mac Pro has gone up a whole half grand – from £2,499 to £2,999.”
Do you have any examples? My press chums are struggling to think of any. There’s always been rebalancing with new models (even very small spec bumps), and this has also happened elsewhere with existing models (Australians have noted this), but concrete examples from the UK would be really handy.
Here is one example. I think it’s been done a few times before and probably more often than has been reported.
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/18/mac-mini-apple-tv-
europe-imac-uk-prices/
[…] Craig Grannell: […]
Thanks for finding that link @Matt G. I knew that there had been UK price cuts and rises in the past but couldn’t find links with proof…
I took a bit of time last week to go to an Apple store and really play around with the new MacBook Pros. In one way, they’re extremely impressive. The keyboard works well for what it is, the touchbar is a really cool and useful idea, the huge trackpad is amazing, even things like the way the hinge feels, or how thin the machine is, are just mindblowing, and way ahead of what pretty much everybody else is doing. I can even accept the complete lack of ugradeability, given the hardware quality I get in return.
But on the other hand, this is just not a machine that does what I need from a portable computer. The keyboard works well enough, but it’s not aimed at people who spend most of their time typing. The touchbar is cool, but despite of what some Apple fans say about touchscreens on laptops, they actually honestly won’t make your arms fall off, and you’ll quickly get used to having them, to the point where it is kind of disconcerting to use a laptop without a touchscreen. Also, being able to write or draw on the screen with a pen is an amazingly useful feature.
And, well, I just need more power. In a world where 90% of the apps people use are web apps, 16 gigs of RAM are starting to look like a bit of a limiting factor even for more casual users.
So I think the new MacBook Pros are extremely cool, impressively engineered machines. But they’re not for me. Apple simply doesn’t make hardware for me anymore.
As somebody who has used Macs since the early 90s, this is kind of a sad realization.
On the other hand, Windows isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be – in some ways, it’s better than a Mac – and Linux is looking much better, too. At least if the Linux file browser crashes, I can just switch to another one, or fix the bug myself.
So I’ve ordered a cheap Linux laptop to see how well it works for me, and if it could possibly replace my MacBook Pro as my main machine.
Lukas: I somewhat feel the same these days. I don’t have a great deal of experience with recent Windows, but I’ve heard good things. Most of what stops me leaving is ties to Apple through work – simply put, it would be suicidal from an income perspective for me to switch desktop operating systems, given my history and existing work. After all, it’s not like I’m suddenly going to get a ton of work writing about PCs.
So I ended up buying a new iMac, even though the hardware isn’t new, before the price shot up. I don’t feel happy with the purchase, and it’s not one I wanted to make. That is a first with any Mac hardware. I feel cheated.
Oddly, Apple does make hardware for me, though – the iPad. I still think that is a superb machine and platform, with amazing software. But it’s also increasingly clear and worrisome that this isn’t the mainstream thinking. iPad’s still not going great guns, and ambition in software across the board doesn’t appear to be what most people want. It makes me wonder about the future (in the same way as funding things like creative work). Where with the Korg Gadgets and Pixelmators of 2026 come from if even today most people balk at paying for anything?
I’m not overly worried about funding in general. I think, historically, software development has always been funded by a tiny minority of computer users.
It’s kind of funny how, every few years, a freshly hatched new dev team releases their first game, and follows it up with a frantic blog post about how 95% of their players are pirating the game. Welcome to software development; it’s always been the case that only a tiny minority of people actually pay for software, and it probably always will be the case.
In a way, that’s not bad; I think of it as a kind of subsidy, where people who can afford it finance software development, and benefit those who can’t afford it. That’s why I don’t feel bad about the fact that my Steam library contains hundreds of games I’ve never even installed, or that my Mac’s App Store purchase history screen is full of apps I don’t remember buying at all. I think of it as paying back for all of the software I copied from my friends when I was a kid.
So the “people don’t pay for software” thing isn’t new. Most people have never really paid for software, and we’ve been mostly fine.
I think that *is* connected to the iPad’s problems, though. Who are the 5% of people who actually pay for software? It’s the kinds of people who are looking for innovation, for interesting, new ideas. The iPad is not a platform where innovative, interesting, new software thrives. Apple’s rules prevent that. There’s some of it, but not nearly enough to make the platform viable as a desktop computer replacement. So the 5% of people who actually pay for software mostly stick to buying stuff on the Mac.
On the iPad, that leaves two other avenues for monetization: selling to businesses (who pay for software because they can get audited), and extracting money from people with manipulative psychological tricks. And that’s more or less where the iPad’s at nowadays.
I think I’m looking at this more as a general trend. It seems less and less viable to make a living creating things these days. Not that people who do so are owed a living, but I’d hate to think that we’ll end up losing a lot of art, music, video, games, apps and so on, in an age of apparent democratisation.
With software specifically, I take your point about piracy, but I do think there’s a tendency these days for the expectation regarding pricing to be that things should be free or at least very cheap. This started on mobile, but is leaking into desktop as well. On iPad, however, I increasingly see developers say that there’s simply not a big enough market. Perhaps the demand just isn’t there. But that suggests a major problem for Apple in the future if the long game really is for the iPad to somehow take the baton from the Mac. (Or perhaps Apple’s banking on its devices alone being enough. But historically, what’s lent cachet to Apple’s products has been that knowledge that amazing things can be done with them. It’s that notion of ‘that could be me’. What happens when that role is with another, perhaps even Microsoft?)
As for innovation, I think it does exist on the platform, but Apple can be slow to respond in a non-stupid way to the geekier side of things (programming/scripting-oriented fare). For music, though, there’s some truly amazing stuff out there. I won’t shut up about Gadget, mostly because it’s a stunning piece of software. But for every Gadget there are thousands of apps not worth a damn. And for every Gadget, there’s at least one more Gadget that either won’t come to be, or where the dev’s decided to call it a day.