I think Apple's pricing in relationship to other brands is changing. They have historically been seen as a premium brand and were priced accordingly. These days though, they tend to be much more on price-parity or even winning on price. Take a look at how the iMac compares to other premium all-in-one machines? Fairly close. Then the iPad - when the Android competitors were coming out we kept saying how they'd have to be so much cheaper to compete and they weren't. Finally, the Air's $1000 price point is half of what Intel was positioning the Ultrabooks which has caused the other manufacturers to scramble cut their prices.

I think they're still the consumer electronics premium brand par excellence, but they've dominated their supply chains so thoroughly that they've found savings other companies just can't compete with.

You can still buy a laptop for a lot less than $999, though, and that's where other people will come out of the woodwork to show you loud, clumsy looking Acer and HP machines.

I agree, and I think that we're going to see a lot more of that now that Tim Cook, 'Mr Supply Chain', is in charge.

Only ten years of evidence? I still remember the Performa lines costing twice as much as a comparable PC. I wouldn't go so far as to call Apple products Veblen goods, but they're pretty close, and I don't see iPad's $500 pricing harming it in any way.

Just using '10 years' as weak shorthand for the last time I could remember anyone was right about Apple cutting prices. Certainly they did in the clone era (-1997) and you can argue the original iMac as well (thru 2002 when the sunflower debuted).

Remember when people said the iPod was doomed because of cheaper competition? That didn't work out so hot, I hear.

And yet apple still released the shuffle... Weird huh?

Did they release it because they were losing money to competitors, or because they were leaving money on the table with their existing price points? I suspect the latter.

They were losing out on customers so they released an el-cheapo piece of crap. This is my point.

Losing out on customers to who? Or just missing out on selling to customers who wanted a cheaper option? Those are two very different things.

I don't think they release the shuffle because their higher-priced products were suffering in comparison to budget competitors. They released the shuffle because there was demand at the $100 price point that they could profitably address without undercutting their more expensive products.

Famous Steve story I saw last month when he retired about how people at Apple wanted to attack all the mp3 markets from the start but he forced them to focus focus focus on the one big model to get it perfect. Two years later they opened it up, something I take it we'll see with the low end phone and eventually with ipads too.