Writing at a little website called Daring Fireball, John Gruber makes a point about Apple pricing, especially vis-a-vis recently imposed tariffs:
It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand. Throughout the entire COVID crisis, I don’t recall them changing their prices for anything.
We talked about this a bit today on the latest episode of the Six Colors Podcast (for members only, you should sign up!), also in regards to the tariff situation.
In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powerful iMac M4 starts at…$1299.
Granted, with inflation, those prices would be a little different. In researching the details, I came across this great piece from PerfectRec charting the iMac’s price history over the years, including adjusting for inflation. Impressively, while the iMac’s base price has dipped as low as $1099 in all that time, it’s never gone over $1299.
The biggest risk to Apple in pricing is, of course, the iPhone, and at least the company has a few months before it really needs to make a decision about whether or not it’s going to raise the price, eat the difference, or some combination of both. Or, who knows, the situation could be totally different by then.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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