Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to read it during lunch or dinner hours as well.
The only way is upselling
One of the more bizarre stories we covered last week centered around a simple Velcro strap.
Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset, you see, is quite heavy, and the company seems to have solved any possible comfort issues by adding an extra strap that goes over the user’s head. But that strap isn’t shown anywhere in the press photos, and (according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman) will likely cost more than the standard price of $3,499.
If you spend that much money on a product, you would hope comfort would be taken into account. (And it’s entirely possible, let’s stress, that this is the case. For now, that’s just a rumour.) But the idea that the strap won’t be included in the box is unfortunately consistent with Apple’s broader strategy in recent years. Apple has become the king of upselling.
It all started, for me at least, with the charger. In 2020, Apple made the decision to no longer include power adapters with new iPhones, on the grounds that most customers already had one and they all ended up in the landfill. Handy, then, that this move also allowed Apple to downsize the boxes and cut costs without lowering the price. And of course, Apple will gladly sell you an adapter for an extra $19 if you don’t have one. The company has also stopped including EarPods in iPhone cases, which means more AirPods sales.
To be clear, I’m not saying the environmental rationale was entirely spurious. But I strongly suspect that Apple found a really cool idea more appealing because it could be used to make bigger profits. If the company was serious about reducing tech waste in landfills, after all, it would make its phones compatible with a global connection standard rather than a proprietary standard before being forced into it by regulatory pressure. But proprietary cables and chargers are better for upselling.
In 2022, Apple has pulled out all the stops for the upsell strategy. It wasn’t enough for customers to spend $799 on a new iPhone 14; the company gave this device a year-old processor and generally did everything it could to push customers who could afford it to get the $999 14 Pro instead. (In our review, we called the 14 “essentially an iPhone 13.”) Likewise, the Apple Watch Series 8 was barely an improvement over its predecessor – why bother with the Series 8, when you have the Apple Watch Ultra to be pushed – and the AirPods Pro have been pushed heavily over the standard AirPods. Every company wants you to buy its most expensive models, but for Apple that year it became an obvious and calculated strategy to an extent never seen before.
It’s hard to argue against decisions made by a company that just hit a market cap of $3 trillion (again). But that sort of thing — shelling out an extra $400 for the wheels, when your customer has already paid $6,999 for a Mac Pro — may not be wise in the long run. It can push people back, erode goodwill towards your brand, but more importantly, it makes your entry-level products feel like a bit, well, garbage. And those who can’t afford the iPhone 14 Pro or the Apple Watch Ultra or the Vision Strap Plus might decide to ditch the idea altogether and spend their money elsewhere.
Have your say
Thanks to readers who reached out to last week’s Siri-bashing column. I was reassured to find that some of you are even angrier about the state of Apple’s error-prone personal assistant than I am.
Richard Raymond-Smith, for example, complained bitterly about Siri’s apparent regression. It used to be able to respond to natural language queries about a trip’s ETA, he notes, but now unnecessarily responds like, “Here’s what I found on the web about the ETA…” That’s a big fail, Siri.
Robert Williams, meanwhile, finds it “mystifying that Apple continues to smear its reputation for great products by meddling with a product REALLY inferior to, say, Alexa”, and wonders why one of the software engineers at the company company would gladly work on Siri. , given the embarrassment factor when revealing this in conversation. And Gus Pistolis challenges: “How can we mount a grassroots effort to get Apple to create a better, if not new, Siri?” The campaign starts here!
Email me if you have any strong opinions on this week’s article above; I can’t answer all of them, but I read them. No promises, but I might include some additional reader comments next week.
Foundry
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Podcast of the week
The Apple Watch is getting its first major operating system overhaul this fall. And can FaceTime boost Apple TV hardware sales? Plus, the fundamental change coming to all of Apple’s operating systems, all in this episode of the igamesnews Podcast!
You can watch every igamesnews podcast episode on Spotify, Soundcloud, Podcasts app or our own site.
Software updates, bugs and issues
iOS17 finally exploits the full potential of the iPhone 6.
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And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you want to receive regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us or on Facebook to discuss the latest news from Apple. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.
Table of Contents
