Comment by scarface74
8 years ago
In the 40 years that Apple has been in business, it's never gone after the low end market. The Apple // series was always more expensive than its contemporaries, as was the Mac and now the iPhone. There was a brief time that Apple had the lowest cost media players but that was because they cornered the market on the hard drives that they were using and then the flash market.
But why would they? They already capture 80%+ of the profit in the global cell phone market.
Apple's never owned an entire segment, as it did smartphones.
And, actually, it does have a tiered presence: iPad, iPhone, iPod, Shuffle. I'm not sure how many of those remain extant.
The goal would be staving off encroachment from below.
But the "tier" is just lower priced compared to other Apple products, not lower priced compared to competitors.
The average selling price of an Android phone is $202 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/309472/global-average-se...). That's still $150 less than the cheapest iPhone.
The average selling price of a tablet is still much less than the lowest cost iPad.
Apple doesn't sell iPods anymore except the iPod in name only iPod Touch.
Apple only has about 12% world wide market share in smart phones.
I understand that. My point being that, at least for "mobile distraction device", Apple does in fact have a tiered, price-discriminating (in the economic sense) set of products.
There's also the used-device market, as noted by another reader. I'd considered making that point as well, though uncharacteristically for me I decided to focus on a single thread.