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Comment by iamdead | Hacker News Reader

> Apple got a lot of explaining to do for the market to justify its price tag.

If it were down to feature lists and price tags, Apple wouldn't be selling very many phones. It seems Apple might be explaining itself in a way that doesn't resonate with you, which is which is fine.

> I am wondering if part of the deal is making sure Apple sticking to x86 and Specifically Intel's x86 CPU on the Mac for at least another 5 years. No ARM or AMD Mac.

I suspect that Apple had a lot of leverage in this negotiation, since they were the main ones interested in using Intel's modems as leverage against Qualcomm. So Intel's modems are more valuable to Apple than they are to other players, including Intel. But I don't know anything.

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> Intel's modems are more valuable to Apple than they are to other players, including Intel

That implies that Intel has the leverage. Intel's BATNA is to just let the modem IP rot. It's a sunk cost. They can just walk away from the negotiating table, and they'll be choosing to get $0 + ($small * potential of selling to anyone else = $ε) instead of $1B.

Apple's BATNA, meanwhile, is for Qualcomm to steamroll them and force them into expensive concessions across the board, and they're willing to pay through the nose to avoid that. Their choice is between $1B to intel and likely far more than $1B to Qualcomm.

Yes, and Apple still has lots of cash on hand, >$200billion. $1billion is a small price to pay in order to solidify a strong bargaining position with a multi-billion dollar vendor contract that has been a legal and financial thorn in their side. Especially given their long term roadmap for i-devices has been one of gradual vertical integration.

If Intel hadn’t sold to Apple, they would have had to pay out severance packages to 2200 engineers, plus break costs on whatever ongoing contracts existed (leases etc). So the comparison isn’t +$1B against $0, more like +$1B against -$1B (or at least a decent fraction of that), with the costs growing every day that the negotiations continued and the likelihood of a sale to anyone else continuing to drop (from a very low base).

>If it were down to feature lists and price tags, Apple wouldn't be selling very many phones. It seems Apple might be explaining itself in a way that doesn't resonate with you, which is which is fine.

I wish it was just the Internet, but increasingly I have had people complaining about iPhone's prices in Real life, and they are not in the Tech Circle. A few days ago the podcast from Macobserver on Apple's prices had a section on it as well, more people are questioning the prices, especially when they have something else to compare to.

I could paid double the price simply because of iOS. But 3x is a little hard, and I cant explain to friends why is Apple so expensive either.

It's worse than that in my opinion, because Apple's prices have the effect of sort of "giving permission" to other flag ships to also jack up prices significantly. The Galaxy S7 edge was retailed at $779 on release. The comparably positioned s10 plus starts at $999. More with more storage space, though I don't recall if the s7 edge had additional internal storage upgrades like that (it did have user expandable storage though)

The problem is that Apple intentionally crippled the XR so that they could more easily upsell people to the XS.

This punishes users who want to replace their iPhone 7, since Apple simply doesn't make a good phone in that price bracket anymore.

> 3x is a little hard, and I cant explain to friends why is Apple so expensive either.

How do you explain to them that Huawei's own P30 Pro sells for several times what their Honor 9x sells for? Does Huawei need to explain that to the market too? We've seen high spec midrange phones that sold for a fraction of flagship prices for years but Apple has never attempted to go after that part of the market.

And I imagine if you wanted to you could compile a long list of iphone selling points besides privacy. For example, my wife's nearly two year old iphone 8 has a ST Geekbench score that's 50% higher than the Honor 9x (4228 vs 2832). Maybe that's part of why Gazelle will pay more for her phone today ($289, 64 gb) than the 9x retails for.

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