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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2019-08-29, 15:18

Quote:
Originally Posted by Robo View Post
I’m sure the circa-2015 MacBook Air Apple was selling until this summer was “good enough” for a lot of people, too, but that doesn’t mean they should keep selling it forever with no updates. The competition gets better every year. People’s standards go up.
OK sure, but I don't think the two compare.

The MacBook Air, by around 2017, was basically an outdated computer that maybe they could've kept selling for a while at like $749. I don't even think they kept the price point to keep the revenues high, but rather because having such a low-cost Mac is weird messaging if you're gonna drop it soon after (marketing is complicated, y'all).

The iPad 2018 isn't that. Sure, it only has an A10, but it has a Retina Display (unlike said MacBook Air), and even has some Pencil support.

If that iPad were the only iPad Apple is selling, we'd be asking, "is Apple gonna introduce a higher-end iPad eventually?" We wouldn't be asking, "hey, why does the iPad suck so hard?" — because it doesn't. It obliterates any Android tablet (which in part is really Google's screw-up rather than Apple's success, but still) and then some.

If the old MacBook Air is your first Mac, you'll come away thinking, "well, that was a little pricey, and the Mac honestly doesn't seem all it's cracked up to be". If the iPad 2018 is your first iPad, it'll be "this is pretty great. Maybe my next one will be higher-end!"

If it weren't for education, if I were running iPad marketing, I'd bump the price points on the iPad 2018 and iPad Air $100 each. The 2018 is a steal right now, and moving it upwards makes the Air a weird in-between. But Apple needs to work on their education customers (no, seriously, figure it out, Apple), so the price point makes sense.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Robo View Post
Holding back one product to protect another is the sort of pernicious idea that, once it takes root, slowly strangles a company. Apple has always bee emphatic about avoiding this sort of thinking, about pushing each product to be the best it can be, even if that challenges the other teams to make their products more capable.
Well, yes and no. The counterpoint to cannibalization I would make is the paralysis of choice. I tend not to agree, but I can see kscherer's point — if they upgrade the iPad 2018, it becomes even harder to understand why you'd even go for the Air.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Robo View Post
A 9.7-inch version of the current iPad Air is pretty much exactly what I’d expect the next base iPad to look like. Which is fine, because I’d expect the iPad Air to get better too.
Sure. But Apple tends not to coordinate such upgrades, so there'd be a weird period in between that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Robo View Post
I always figured I would get whatever was equivalent of the current $1799 four-port MacBook Pro — the base “real” Pro with the higher-watt processors — and then bump the RAM up, because of course the base config wouldn’t have enough. So, like, $2k.

I’m sure the 14-inch Pro will come with a bit of a price bump, because this is Apple, but there’s a big difference between $2200 and like $3300 for me. If the 16-inch started at $2399, like the current 15-inch, I would maybe stretch and get it, even though I’d really want something smaller. But at $3299 or thereabouts, I just wouldn’t, even if that was a fair price for the computer. I’d probably just get the cheapest Pro I could (because I am not spending $2k on a computer with that keyboard) and be sad about it.
Yeah, no, I'm not expecting most (or even many) people to go for a $3,299 MBP, especially now that Apple has, well, slightly reduced the confidence we have in that product.