Comment by hamdingers
2 days ago
Ironically this makes me want to buy this discontinued model, not anything currently supported by Bose.
2 days ago
Ironically this makes me want to buy this discontinued model, not anything currently supported by Bose.
A better way to say that is "This will boost the second-hand value of older Bose speakers".
Budget-aware folks will buy these second-hand, neophiles will buy new, confident that long term solutions will exist even after "long term support" is over.
Heck, even knowing there's a second-hand market makes me more likely to buy Bose new.
Many companies miss how important this is, too: they get caught up in "but if they buy it second-hand, they're not buying our new stuff!". When people buy the stuff second-hand, though, they become Bose fans — that means when the second-hand Bose stuff dies, they're more likely to replace it with new Bose stuff. That's particularly true with audio equipment, where people become attached not only to how something works but how it sounds. If they like Bose's rather particular audio signature, they'll keep buying more.
Between that and the good-will they're getting from this move, this is making a ton of life-long Bose fans out of a lot of audio geeks. And if there's a community well-known for creating religions out of their hardware preferences...
Another thing companies miss is that the second-value is priced in to the price. If I know I can resell a thing for some value, that makes it more valuable than if I can't resell it all, and I can pay more for it. Contrary to what the companies think, they were in fact compensated for the after market value, and it's even better then they hoped, because that compensation occurred at time of first sale rather than some random time years later.
The most amusing anti-example of this was the Switch generation: $60 for a cartridge, or $60 for a digital license. Guess which is actually more valuable? Guess which you were more likely to find discounted, even if only by a marginal amount, by some store desperate to move stock out of the way?
By contrast, I'm not worried about the fact I can't resell my copy of Game X I got on Steam when I only paid $5 for it in the first place.
Indeed, and also people buying second-hand are pretty unlikely to buy brand new if they aren't able to find the second-hand item (or use it). It's similar to piracy in that respect, that some people who pirate might have actually bought it, but the majority likely would not have anyway so can't just say "1,000 people pirated our thing, therefore we lost 1,000 sales". The cynic in me thinks they know that and just use it as a convenient way to over-inflate the damage piracy is doing to them, but that's a separate topic
1 reply →
It makes me want to buy both! Old to tinker with, new to support the move.
Bose products seem like they are most popular with older, non-technical people who see it as a luxury brand. This is the same reaction that I would have with this news because I like modifying hardware/firmware, but I was never in the market to buy Bose products in the first place. My parents on the other hand have at least 3 wave radios in the house.