Coca Cola sells water with flavouring and quite astonishing amounts of sugar. Apple sells nice devices made by what might as well be slave labour.

Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies.

The criticisms of individual campaigns here are missing the point. It's not about micro ad spend, but the perception of value and manipulation of behaviour created by the combined effect of multiple PR and advertising efforts - which include traditional print and TV/radio ad campaigns, guided advertorials disguised as news in the MSM, interviews with prominent figures, political campaigns of more or less obvious relevance to the core business activity, state, national, and international political lobbying, direct political campaign donations, advertorials masquerading as "freelance" journalism and blogging, managed astroturfing on social media, shareholder relationship management, product placements in movies and music promo videos, articles about commercial visual design elements in trade journals. And on and on.

That perception of value is - unsurprisingly - extremely valuable. And it's very much a US way of doing business. Instead of producing products that are inherently superior, produce something that is functional but glossily packaged, brand it as a premium lifestyle commodity, and charge exorbitant prices for it.,

The prices are traditionally far out of proportion to its actual utility. In fact real utility may well be negative - see also diabetes and any number of other health issues, depression associated with social media use, debt-driven spending on lifestyle products. Etc.

So the rent seeking comes from a kind of cultural squatting. There is value in dominating discourse in all of these different ways, because discourse and narrative define markets and ultimately control behaviour. And while this is happening other kinds of discourse - which may well have more real utility - are diminished at best and crowded out at worst.

So in this case it doesn't matter if Uber "wasted" their money. Uber have their own branding thing going, and explicit ad spend is a tiny part of that.

And even if all online ad spending ended tomorrow, a small number of corporations would have a difficult time for a while, but the marketing industry as a whole would inevitably interpret the change as minor damage and route around it.

That’s not rent seeking by any accepted definition.

Because the ideology of capitalism is "cooridation failure, whatever", It sure would be nice to find a way for one of those companies to freeload off the culture-shaping the others do, and bring the whole enterprise crashing down!

Trademark laws exist to prevent such freeloading. In this context, they ensure only the ones paying for the culture-shaping can benefit from it.

This analysis excludes glossy packaging and status signalling from the inherent superiority, when (in terms of overall market value) they're part of the superiority.

And in Coca-Cola's case (among others) the advertising is much of what creates the value. When you know it's a Coke, it tastes better. I've had a lifetime of absorbing ads that make me think of good things whenever I know I'm drinking a Coke.

> Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies.

In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all. "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather sooner than later), and has next to no resale value while in contrast even old cheesegrater Mac Pro's fetch many hundreds of dollars today. iPhones are supplied with firmware updates far longer than most Android phones outside the flagship Pixel line are. OS X is, while it has gotten locked down a fair bit over the last years, still way better than Windows as it doesn't do tracking bullshit and start menu ads and decently better than Linux because no matter which device, stuff usually Just Works (tm) without having to fiddle for hours to get something as basic as a Bluetooth headset working.

Apple built themselves a loyal following with pure quality superiority over the competition, unlike HP or Dell who are only surviving because of enterprises who follow the "no one got fired for buying IBM" line.

And that doesn't even touch that it's Apple who's at the forefront of innovation. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, AirPods, now the M1 CPU - these entire device classes were created by Apple. When was the last time you heard about something truly innovative from the Windows/MS/Google side of IT? Only thing I can remember is the Google Glass.

What Apple is doing is not a "brand management strategy" per se - it is delivering actual value and innovation instead of rent-seeking. And for what it's worth Tesla are doing the same thing.

>A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years

This shows that you are just spreading FUD. A Windows machine is no slower after 10 years than it is the day you bought it. Sure you might have added so much software-crap that the software runs slow (which is easily fixed) but the hardware is exactly as fast after 10 years as Apple hardware is. Do you think Apple builds their hardware out of magic and unicorns?

>but the hardware is exactly as fast after 10 years as Apple hardware is.

Capacitor, DRAM, Heat Sink, etc.... There are quality difference in hardware. Although the two / three years remarks were definitely exaggerated.

> A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather sooner than later), and has next to no resale value while in contrast even old cheesegrater Mac Pro's fetch many hundreds of dollars today.

By "typical windows laptop" do you mean a cheap model where the macbook equivalent is buying nothing at all? Of course it's going to be lacking in that case.

Well-made windows laptops exist, and hold plenty of value. But you have to pay for that, no matter what brand you choose.

> tracking bullshit

Like checking signing certificates by pinging servers almost every time you run a program?

I've been using my windows laptop daily for 5.5 years without issue.

Apple isn't repairable. Apple devices have high prices simply because of the brand ecosystem. Old Thinkpads use commodity parts - but they command good prices because they are repairable.

Marketing the new thing is what Apple does. It is good at it. That is not the entire spectrum of customer value.

Thinkpads are pretty much the worst form factor for a laptop that doesn't transition into "toy" space.

Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.

I recommend a dell xps 13 developer edition

The trackpad is superior to apples and it can come preloaded with linux

That shows that 1) people are different or 2) you are a fan of Apple hardware. It doesn't show that Thinkpads are bad. IMO they are light-years ahead of anything Apple sells.

Source: Me.

Out of curiosity, how do use it without bumping the trackpad while typing?

My trackpad is automatically muted/unresponsive while I'm typing. I suggest you figure out how to get palm rejection to activate/work on your setup, and to look if a different Thinkpad series might better fit your body (ergonomics wise).

There is no option to enable "palm rejection" in the Settings dialog on Ubuntu under "Mouse and Trackpad", as far as I can tell.

It might not be that easy, and could require manually installing some packages.

Effectively every restaurant in the US has to pay either PepsiCo or Coca Cola. Similarly, if you want to buy a non-alcoholic beverage at the grocery store it's mostly down to those two (with Dr. Pepper having a much smaller but still significant stake). Any competitor that emerges just gets bought up by one of the three.

Apple's half of the phone Duopoly. Either you pay them or pay Google if you want a phone and want to buy software for it.

I'm not sure this is quite right. I would have thought that most restaurants very much WANT to sell sodas, as the margins are enormous--much, much higher than the margins on cooked food.

This page [0], for instance, says the cost of goods sold for the soda itself is a penny an ounce for the syrup and CO2. Iced tea is apparently the margin champion, as the same page indicates it can cost as little as a penny per glass.

[0] https://www.restaurantowner.com/public/Restaurant-Rules-of-T...

Restaurants only pay because consumers demand it and would not visit the restaurant otherwise. That’s not rent seeking. That’s market forces. And what they pay correlates with how much their customers demand coke/Pepsi.

The rent seeking is buying up competitors until its a duopoly and then protecting that through shenanigans like exclusive agreements. It has nothing to do with consumer demand.

Buying up competitor does not immediately make it a monopoly or duopoly. Especially in industry where barrier of entry are low.

Exclusive / Special agreement with serving only one kind of Soda ( or no Pepsi where there is Coke ) are Anti-Competitive arrangement. Not Rent Seeking.

The exclusivity contracts are what some consider to be rent seeking. I don't know if this is the correct term, but I do believe they are anti-capitalist and shouldn't be allowed in a capitalist economy. If freedom of choice is so important, than large businesses shouldn't be able to use their ability to corner the market to force you into exclusivity agreements.

Yes. But in fairness I retracted rent sneaking as a combination of monopolization, bonafied rents, addiction, and just shear damn inertia contributes to the malaise.

Calling it all "rent seeking" is not a hill I want to die one.

"Rent sneaking" is an interesting typo. Going to have to give some thought to how to use that term in appropriate context.