Re:Apple Unveils a More Powerful Apple TV
by derefr on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @04:34PM
(#10194379)
There's a difference between "luxury" and (the visual equivalent of) "audiophile." People with money to waste buy Beats headphones, not Sennheisers. Thus why Apple acquired the former instead of the latter. Targeting the high-market buyer doesn't usually imply making your product capable of doing all the latest and greatest bleeding-edge things and beating the competition in a highest-numbers contest, any more than BMW sells its products as race-cars.
Of course, some rich people are racing-car enthusiasts, or audiophiles, or whatever else—and it seems to be more common in the high-end, simply because more of the rich can afford to actually get these things when they want them. But that doesn't mean that the desire is a rich-people thing, or that making something super-duper-high-numbered will make it sell more to the rich.
(Of course, if you give the thing a super-duper-high-numbered price tag, you might inspire some rich people to get it as a Veblen good, which can often look like a desire for the bleeding-edge. You'll frequently find things purchased in this way being underutilized—4K "Veblen TVs" purchased in order to watch 480p Seinfeld re-runs and so on.)
Of course, some rich people are racing-car enthusiasts, or audiophiles, or whatever else—and it seems to be more common in the high-end, simply because more of the rich can afford to actually get these things when they want them. But that doesn't mean that the desire is a rich-people thing, or that making something super-duper-high-numbered will make it sell more to the rich.
(Of course, if you give the thing a super-duper-high-numbered price tag, you might inspire some rich people to get it as a Veblen good, which can often look like a desire for the bleeding-edge. You'll frequently find things purchased in this way being underutilized—4K "Veblen TVs" purchased in order to watch 480p Seinfeld re-runs and so on.)