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Comment by napierzaza | Hacker News Reader

I think these companies thrive with a confusing market. If you can easily compare two products then the purchase is muddied. I've seen this often with different grocery store products in regards to volumes and masses on sale for fungible items.

I think it's best to have confusing figures and specs when you have all these manufacturers who are really trying to produce the cheapest of something (in this case PCs or cellphones). You put the money and the marketing in maybe one overworked detail (big screen, big HDD, fast video card) and then cheap out on everything else. So if they want a certain user to buy their product, they emphasize what they think that user wants.

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It is especially infuriating in the grocery store when they "go to the trouble" of adding conversion information to the shelf label but then aren't consistent with the units on similar products. Thanks HEB, since you did the math I know that this juice is $0.03/oz. and that juice is $0.79/liter. That helps alot.

Even more infuriating is when they don't even bother to do the unit pricing! two sizes of the same product- one says "18.00/unit" and the other says "everyday price $21.99"!

I once saw a (pre-packaged, junk food) product that was priced at "$0.35 per 100g" or some such, when the individual portions within the box were 75g each.

This is much more frustrating when they do it with nutritional information, showing you the nutritional values for 0.87 individually wrapped jam cakes.

Exactly! The main idea is to prevent the customer to easily compare features, especially with the offerings of other manufacturers, which would force the company to compete with lower prices, which is obviously undesirable. So it's really intentional in different businesses and there's a word for it, even if it's formulated by a cartoonist:

http://riskman.typepad.com/perilocity/2008/12/confusopoly-or...

> I think these companies thrive with a confusing market

I don't understand why this is so common, that confusing and ultimately making people unhappy is somehow good for business. Does it actually work this way? I mean, it seems Apple is doing okay and makes customers generally very happy with their products - are they the only exception?

It's easier and cheaper. Apple's higher-margin prices allow them to spend more on things like design, usability and really great marketing.

If you're selling commodity products, the best you can do is make it difficult to compare to the other products. Go mattress shopping, you'll see what I'm talking about.

I think that the issue is that Apple spends the time to make quality products, while other manufacturers might just spend the time to make a product that is 'just good enough.' If someone were to be able to do direct comparisons between a 'good enough' and a 'great' product, they wouldn't even think twice about the 'good enough' product.

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