https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
Also whilst some employees may find it fun and others on H1B have no choice but working 80+ hours is not sustainable.
So before making conclusions about whether Twitter is some innovative new approach to headcount I would give it a little more time.
The real lie isn't that this was a difficult and costly change for their top-notch team. The real lie is that this works at all - some dev out there is waiting with no fingernails left for the bugs to start pouring in.
This is an effective way to communicate to their developer audience while also keeping their shareholders informed.
Most people who read this press release would probably respond: Woah, that's how pricing on the app store works? Devs can't just set whatever price they want? The natural and totally reasonable followup question should be: Why? There are: reasons! There aren't no legitimate reasons why it is how it is (exchange rates is probably the most legitimate one). But the most significant illegitimate reason why is undeniably: momentum. This is how the system works; this is how the people proximate to the system, internally and externally, understand it to work. We linearly extrapolate how the system works today, to how we want it to work; fill in the gaps on the number line.
That extrapolation is genuinely where the inefficiency bloat of big tech comes from. Kyla Scanlon recently did a great economics-focused summary of big tech's "predator problem", born from decades of extremely low interest rates [1], which I think covers the situation really well. Apple & the App Store haven't had a predator. There has been no pressure for them to become more efficient; to rethink the platform from fundamentals; so you end up with teams whose task was to linearly extrapolate the wrong thing. It probably took many people; a long time; and there are almost definitely extremely smart on-call engineers right now biting their fingernails hoping it works. Its entirely the wrong thing; but it was the easier thing over alternatives without the natural pressure of a predator to add weight to the right thing.
When software & systems become sufficiently large, changes become difficult. Predators prey on an inability to change, but big tech hasn't had a predator to do this.
> significantly increased to comply with existing decrees and regulations.
What decrees and regulations? If the US wanted stuff to be illegal, make it illegal. You seem to be implying that Twitter should be a substitute government.
And EU member states eg. Germany have their own rules for what content is allowed or not.
You can argue whether the laws are appropriate or not but Twitter does have to comply with them or stop making their product available in those jurisdictions.
That's, like... I don't even know. Feels infantilizing to me. Or what am I missing?
The alternative would be to have developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers (keeping track of exchange rates for 175 different regions is work). Or to do automatic currency conversion from {developer's native country here}, which would eliminate some of the manual work but lead to "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer, and then you're almost back at the current price point scheme.
Frankly it doesn't matter what the exact price is. All economics are approximate.
For example, on the surface it seems redundant to have overlapping prices bands
$0.29-$9.99 in $0.10 increments
$0.49-$49.99 in $0.50 increments
$0.29-$9.99 in $0.10 increments
$9.99-$49.99 in $0.50 increments> developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers
while this also is more aligned to Apple's goals, unless there's also a proven and generalized (geographically and at all price points, app types) observation where the price looking beautiful as 0.99 massively offsets the actual revenue gains of being 1.23.
> "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer,
Isn't this change an introduction of those ugly prices? If I'm reading the new rules correctly, Apple now supports prices like 7.39 or 37.40. I guess they don't end in a 1-4 or 6-8, but they aren't the cleanest numbers either. And if that last digit is really the problem, rounding to the nearest 5 is always a possibility.
Your answer may be factually true but it is logically flawed.
Unless there is some marketing value here I suspect it has more to do with making sure they don't lose a half cent of commission rather than benefiting anyone else in any real way.
Here seems make some sense.
Crazy.
Apple sees themselves as a storefront not a payment processor, so maybe the idea is to make things look more consistent as you're scrolling through or comparing multiple apps.
This description may help:
>Developers can set a base price for a storefront and currency they know well, and they will see autogenerated suggestions for prices for other regions and currencies—which they can either accept or replace with their own chosen prices.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/apple-announces-swee...
But originally the App Store was leveraging their existing payment infrastructure e.g. the one they use for iPhone sales. Purchases and invoices were done through SAP which was manually configured to support those price points. It's why you saw weird behaviour e.g. invoices for free app "purchases" and largely the limitations of that system drove what they could and could not do.
Perhaps they've done an overhaul for this system or migrated to a custom built one which is what has enabled all of this new functionality.
I think they just like the simplicity and cleanness in the store. I like it as well.
Are you crazy? And miss out on yet another opportunity for Apple to rub their stank on something?
Fortunately it doesn't seem to apply to IAP so apps will still be able to sell $99 barrels of smurfberries.
I miss the pre-IAP days.
Then again, at this point, Apple is a treasury operation that also sells phones and computers.
I'm guessing you are joking but incase you were not, Apple still makes far far more from selling new products than they do from investments. So that statement is false or misleading.
When you RTFA, you'll learn that Apple is also making it far simpler to manage their app pricing in 45 currencies/175 storefronts. For example:
"Starting today, developers of subscription apps will also be able to manage currency and taxes across storefronts more effortlessly by choosing a local storefront they know best as the basis for automatically generating prices across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies. Developers will still be able to define prices per storefront if they wish. The pricing capability by storefront will expand to all other apps in spring 2023."
Additional capabilities are noted in the announcement.
App developers don't want to go choose a competitive price in every one of 174 locales.
But they also don't want to be pricing too high or low for what the local population can afford/is willing to pay.
Let apple do the fancy machine learning to figure out optimal translation tables for each locale to maximize revenue.
So I don’t understand what’s different here.
The VPP was a way for a small company to basically purchase download codes and distribute as needed.
Apple loves design and beauty. Crisp numbers and stability are more user friendly and aesthetic. Also some numbers have implications in certain markets. Seeing numbers like or $69.42 or $444 or $7.23 is just bad all around.
International price conversion while maintaining those is also challenging.
Before attacking Apple policies, it's worth considering why their extremely deep design process might have led to that choice.
Pricing like this:
$7.23 $5.48 $9.21
is just ugly and feels cheap. It's the same reason they have UX standards generally.
Why does anyone care about 1 cent on a $5 purchase? Does anyone here care? The new price points seem to provide enough flexibility with less disadvantage.
From a business perspective, if I had to guess the increased cognitive load would decrease shopping time and increase decision fatigue. I'd also guess that the retail industry has studied this endlessly, and that Apple is basing their pattern partially on this.
This also decreases opportunities for useless psychological price competition and focuses people on quality. Do I want the $1.82 product or the $1.93 product? You probably want the BETTER product.
I think you're probably better off having your prices at $0.99, $2.99, and $5.99 rather than $0.84, $2.72, $5.63, even tho the latter is cheaper, particularly if you are in a large store that has thousands of prices.
Offering a wider range of price points will allow developers to better tailor their pricing to different markets, and it will also give consumers more flexibility when choosing which apps to pay for.
It'll be interesting to see how this change affects the App Store ecosystem in the coming months, and whether it leads to more satisfied users or possibly more predatory subscriptions. The increased flexibility in pricing could be a great benefit for developers and consumers, but I'm going to keep an eye on how it impacts the meta of the pricing models.
EDIT: Not sure why this was flagged/replied to as GPT - I wrote this.
In retrospect I could have not summarized parts of the post, since ideally we've all read from the source information. Live and learn.
I.e. if you bought something that cost $5 you could just hand the $5 to the cashier and they could just avoid ringing you up and pocket the money. In contrast if the object cost $4.99 or $4.95 say they would have to ring it up in the till so they could open it to provide change to the customer.
I heard this on Tom Scott's Podcast "Lateral" recently.
The article says you can. It's one of the "supported conventions".
This looks silly, and many people, including me, have taught themselves to recognize this pattern and round the price correctly without a mental effort.
Some people, of course, fall for it; I suppose younger kids are heavily affected.
I took one look at that and thought "fuck this". If you're a hobbyist with zero interest in making money off your apps, then you get a giant middle finger from Apple.
No ads, no IAP. As a parent it is also handy for the same reasons as far as the kids devices go.
My only issue is as a long time iPhone user they have a lot of games labeled as “+” which means it was previously available but had cost money.
There are many great games, but they’re not with a lot to me as I’ve already played them.
Great for people who hadn’t though.
Reading some of the other comments, it sounds like some people really hate ads and in app purchases
Yes, HN has the rule "*Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
All the more so because they have a strong incentive to bury the lede (I mean in general—not saying that about this announcement), and while third-party sites have other crap incentives, like sensationalism and clickbait, they at least don't do that.
So many applications and subscriptions are incredibly expensive when they're priced for the USA which has been over valued for so many years now.
— edit —
Looks like the award goes to an app for Piano Tuners. Find a niche and corner it. $1,000.
Americans have this odd thing of quoting prices without tax which tends to be illegal elesewhere. OK the US does not have a sales type tax on digital goods,
Here’s an example: a base model iPhone 14 is $799. If I go to the Downtown San Francisco Apple Store, it is $868.12; if I go across a bridge to the Berkeley Apple Store it is $880.90; if I go from there across a different bridge to Corte Madera it is $870.91; if I go back through San Francisco down to the neighboring county to the Hillsdale Apple Store it is $875.90; and if I buy it in Cupertino, then it is $871.91. If I cross the State border with Oregon and go to an Apple Store in Tigard or Portland, then it is $799.
Which is the price Apple should be showing on the Apple Store? They tell you at checkout because what you pay at the end is calculated according to your shipping address, and it’s a line item: sales tax, but pricing is also marketing. Which price should Apple be quoting their American customers in national ad campaigns?
Even within a state, sales taxes can vary at the county and municipality level.
To tell an American the full price plus tax they will pay for something, you need to know where they live. For expensive items like computers and phones, the price could vary by tens or hundreds of dollars.
Cui bono?
Personally, I like that US citizens are constantly reminded how much flesh the State is extracting.
I am American, and I don't pay sales tax.
I had a similar conversation with someone on Twitter complaining that the latest iPhone was much more expensive in EU, but once you factored in VAT and some import costs and the fact that apple.com shows the $ price without any sales tax there wasn't actually such a great disparity.
The old desktop approach of new major versions that people have to purchase periodically is not really feasible on IOS, since old versions would clog up the app store, and there is no way to offer the new versions at a discount to past purchasers, which desktop software likes to do to avoid annoying recent customers when a new version comes out.
So to recover for costs from ongoing development, an app developer will either need to 1) somehow increase the number of people who will purchase the app, 2) add a recurring revenue source like ads to the app (possibly with IAP to disable), 3) make the app subscription based (but only some types of apps can pull this off), or 4) make the app IAP based, and when updating add new features that can be purchased.
Now not every app does any of those. Some will just a single unlock IAP with limited functionality before that. But this is not all that different from the old demo or shareware approach, and the design of the app store makes it generally better to have the demo and full version be the same app, at which point IAP is the way to do that. Without a recurring revenue source though, such apps are likely to either change approach or get abandoned eventually once the costs of periodically upgrading the app exceed the remaining revenue coming in.
----
Also there is the abusive IAP single use item to bypass artificial cooldowns MTX garbage that mobile games tend to be full of, but I really cannot bring myself to accept that as a legitimate business model. Even the Gacha model (terrible as it is) feels somewhat more legitimate, but I have plenty of significant concerns about those too. But I'm really looking at this from the perspective of non-games, or at least not "F2P" games.
To install, try and pay is as easy as to pay, install, and try
To install, try and uninstall is much easier then to pay, install, try, uninstall, and ask for the money back, if the latter us even supported.
What's really bothersome is no option to pay and remove ads. A subscription may be more costly but it's at least honest, and UX is not annoying.
The App Store is a huge market, fortunes have been built, but I know many indie developers who have been reluctant to adopt the F2P model.
As a user, I don't like it either.
So I have no issue with subscribing to many apps I love to fund development, or maybe paying an extra “tip” through IAP. Or just IAP for more content.
But IAP and subscriptions enabled a few models I hate.
Free game (either with ads, IAP, or both) have flooded the App Store and destroyed the market for quality games. Even the better made ones (like Candy Crush) are still designed to wring money out of people.
On the subscription front there are so many scam apps. Buy a calculator app, and pay $5/week for it because they trick people into it.
I’d be happy with no consumable IAPs in games. Or just no IAPs in games at all. And Apple should probably review high subscription prices to find scams. Realistically is there any reason for weekly subscriptions? Maybe just monthly/yearly only.
With IAP, it's really difficult to know what you're getting and how much it will cost you in the end. And reviews may be discussing a completely different app experience. Plus the constant feeling that you're being nickel and dimed.
But I have little interest in games that rely on scammy paid gacha/loot boxes/slot machine mechanics, monetized play-and-wait/energy systems, paid in game currencies, progress paywalls, etc. - not to mention intrusive advertising for monetization schemes. I'm not entirely huge on paid cosmetic options either.
I don't mean to be flippant—you're right that personal opinion is affecting my judgment. I plead that (1) this is inevitable; (2) I do my best to make calls that are good for the community as a whole; and (3) there are vastly more times when I squash my personal preference in favor of #2.
The basic point here is that corporate press releases are their own genre and that that genre goes against HN's mandate at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN submissions are usually primary sources, and the HN comments are where you have the discussion. Sometimes even the top voted comment is just a summary of the actual submission, but rephrased to be less biased or more clear. If HN can’t point out the buried lede or explanation and get it upvoted then there’s a larger problem, but in practice I don’t find this to be the case (though maybe I’m wrong).
Does the article provide anything which the HN comment section wouldn’t?
I'm not saying that was the case here, because I didn't read the articles. However, the pattern is so close to universal that it wouldn't be surprising.
Do you want to cater to the most thorough commentators or the masses?
I would second everyone else’s sentiment that going with the official PR statement is better , especially because Apple are really good about fast loading pages without ads, and none of these other sites provide new information that’s not in the press release.
Additionally many of the third party sites are really bad for accessibility, whereas the official Apple one is excellent for those who need readers.
> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Are you going to verify that the alternative article is accurate and doesn't interpret the official information in a bad way (I mean in general--not saying that about this announcement)?
But in this case I think Appleworld is a poor choice. 9to5[1] are generally much better. Avoid Macrumors and Appleinsider unless it is absolute necessary.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/06/app-store-pricing-changes-dev...
The article you linked is mostly just a copy+paste of the apple page, with a few paragraphs removed.
I personally don't think going from the direct news source -> random news source you just googled that copy+pasted most of it anyway is worth doing.
> but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.
Is it really that much better if they just removed 2~3 paragraphs? They added nothing of value other then trackers and ads.
I do ask seriously - does removing 2~3 paragraphs really make it that much better?
Are we really going to move to having one person (no offense) to arbitrarily change the URLs from the official news source to a random one from your google search results?
tl;dr - doing this removes the benefits of first hand reporting, has effectively no different content, and you appeared to have randomly selected one that offers no clear benefit in it's content.
I really prefer the actual PR links myself, corporate BS or not, because that gives me the language I need to then search out the other stories that are based on that PR. If you start with a blog, now I have to do the process in reverse to find the source. I think the HN policies are just fine in this regard. And even if other links can't be collated into a comment, I generally trust HN readers to provide additional information or helpful links when appropriate.
In this case the page links the PR prominently in the first line of copy, so that seems OK.
Would be interesting to know the thought process for doing this.
Even if it were just for iOS and iPadOS though, they do want iPad Pro to compete with desktops in places where expensive software runs. For instance, Grass Valley Livetouch could be done on an iPad.
It does seem like quite a reach but I think there are a few legitimate niche markets for that price point.
* The vast majority of app store revenue is from games.
* A small number of "whales" spend almost all of the money -- presumably rich kids and adults, and people with an unfortunate gambling addiction.
I think it's $300-400 a year for the pair of them? Easy to justify especially in Simply Piano's case, when you consider what even a few weeks of in-person piano lessons would cost (not that it makes such lessons obsolete, but still).
But yeah, outright buying apps or using IAP... ProCreate, Angry Birds (yay! they re-released the original, which is one of the only two of those I care about, finally! Now if I could just get Seasons again...), several tables in Pinball Arcade bought when they were on steep discount just before they lost the licenses to most of the tables I was interested in. I think that's all my App Store purchases, ever, otherwise.
I think most of the money's from "whales" in shitty F2P games.
Canarymail (A mail client which supports SMTP streaming + PGP) - I think was about 30€ lifetime.
StrongBox Pro (A Keepass 2 client) - 80€ Lifetime
ProCreate - 10€ Lifetime
Affinity Designer 1 - 12€ lifetime
FEZ - 5€ Lifetime (Game)
TweetBot - 5€ Lifetime but now abandoned for Subscription Software. Doesn't work anymore, I'm using the normal Twitter App now (became usable over the last few years). The only app where I was disappointed in doing a lifetime purchase. It was abandoned really quickly after my purchgase.
Blitzer Pro - 10€ Lifetime
Threema - 4€ Lifetime
DWD WarnWetter - 2€ Lifetime. Most accurate weather app for Germany
Facetune 1 - 4€ (Didn't fix my face! Surpise!)
Reeder - 5€ RSS Feed App, I use this together with Miniflux Server
My last purchase was in 2021, Reeder. I made most purchases when I got the devices, and all lifetime over SaaS purchases have paid for themselves by now. :)
But honestly, this was more than I expected.
Not in anyway beyond simple math...thisnwhole scheme likely has more to do with ensuring and determining commissions that anything else.
Another interesting thing: Apple’s price tiers are anchored to the US dollar. Even though I am a German developer, selling only to German speaking people in the EU, I have to adjust my price tier if the USD/EUR exchange rate is changed by Apple. They check for this roughly once per quarter.
e.g. a 1USD price straight converted to the currency could be too high in a weak economy, so the actual price would be set at 0.7 or 0.5 usd
Arcade games may have been designed to deprive players of their quarters/tokens, but they have nothing on modern optimized monetization schemes, including many which bring mobile games much closer to slot machines, in the hope that gambling addict "whale" players will spend the sort of money that they might lose at a casino rather than a Chuck E. Cheese.
So many games that I might otherwise enjoy playing in are simply not fun for me because of the intrusive monetization schemes. F2P games add this annoying metagame of "fight against the obnoxious monetization traps" which I usually don't enjoy.
Bad monetization schemes set up an ugly conflict between developers and players that degrades the gaming experience.
If taxes are included in price, the consumer can just look at the price and compare rather than jumping through the additional mental hoop to determine if one item is subject to sales tax, and what its price is in tgat case.
On the other hand, if the taxes are not included in prices then you will see which one has taxes at checkout and elect not to purchase the item with taxes, preferring the item without taxes.
Furthermore, with taxes included in prices you are more susceptible to unscrupulous vendors charging taxes that should not be applied and pocketing the extra margins. One example of that is with the manufacturer of Niche coffee grinders charging VAT to international customers and pocketing the extra margin.
Why would you care? Having taxes included in sticker prices doesn’t change how much it costs you, only what percentage goes to your government. The only situation where not including taxes is potentially useful is when you explicitly don’t want to pay taxes, but you’re still happy to pay a higher price, if it means less money to the government.
Also in Europe we have a very simple solution to this problem. Every price tag has two numbers. The number in big font includes taxes, the little number underneath is without taxes. If you’re desperate to avoid giving cash to the government, then you just need to find items with the smallest delta between the two numbers. Retailers are also obliged to display both numbers, and provide a tax breakdown on your receipt, so you penny pinch your taxes to your hearts content.
In Europe the tax is listed separately on the bill by law, no need to visit any website.
The amount of tax charged isn't hidden in Europe, it's just that the most prominent number is the total sum. The pre-tax part and all the taxes are also available separately for your information.
It’s even worse than that, which I learned unfortunately at a former employer. Two identically priced dresses could have different tax rates based on the formality of one vs the other, ie one being a simple LBD and the other being a sequined evening gown.
I’ll have to ask someone as I’ve forgotten the specific jurisdiction, but yes, it was sales tax specifically. If memory serves, it was either a county or municipality sales tax I thought in one of the states of the United States, but I’ll see if I can confirm.
Edit:
Here’s one source:
https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2020/02/how-to...
In that case, it’s statewide it seems for Pennsylvania. Clothing in general isn’t taxed, but formalwear is.
I know there are a lot more odd variations than just that.
That said, I think it helps both the buyer and seller to have good UX.
Developers can go in 10c price steps from $0.29 to $9.99 (0.39, 0.49, 0.59, etc), or in 50c price steps from $0.49 to $49.99 (0.49, 0.99, 1.49, 1.99, etc), etc OR developers can use the 4 supported conventions for any price in those ranges, as long as you fit within the convention.
But you cannot start at a supported convention and then use the price steps.
Apple loves design and beauty. Crisp numbers and stability are more user friendly and aesthetic.
TLDR; if it works don’t touch it.
In the case of Apple they sometimes do this and other times not. So for example the iPhone 14 is 999€ in both Germany and Austria, even though they have 19% vs 20% VAT rates. However in Finland which has a 24% rate the iPhone 14 is 1039€.
Almost every example I gave was within one State: California, except for the two I tacked on at the end from California’s nearest northern neighbor in Oregon. All of the California examples were within the same metro area (the San Francisco Bay Area) but different counties. There is one US website, and one US App Store.
It is not the same situation, only seemingly superficially similar until further inspection.
I refuse to use apps like this. None of my Apple IDs have payment information associated with them.
It's the developer's choice, just like family sharing for the original purchase. This was a good move, since so many apps went from paid to free demo +IAP to unlock. I think a lot of devs who previously allowed family sharing for paid apps have turned family sharing on for IAP.
But yes, the market is warped and Apple has a lot of work to do to make it a better marketplace.
This is a step in the right direction though. Maybe more steps will follow.
And as Apple demonstrated in Netherlands with the dating apps it is actually cheaper to use them that try to run your own payment system. Especially if you're trying to target a global audience.
Also, devs still do put ads in some purchasable apps So just having a "one time purchase" toggle doesnt solve the problem.
Comparatively, a high-profile client spending tens of thousands of dollars in ads isn't doing so on impulse, they're doing it cause it's their job. They'll open up a browser and punch in some banking details if it's the only way to get those ads out.
That sounds interesting! Can you share a link?
In any case, actually probably have such rules, just not public. I am sure they have sales people being paid full time to agonise over such issues.
Can I just say finding out that Apple uses SAP on the backend is just one of those things that shakes my world view.
1) It's one of the largest SAP deployments in the US if not the world
2) SAP (at the time) was the only one who could offer an ERP that scaled to do what Apple wanted.
Homegrown enterprise software is one of those things that sounds great until you realize you're re-inventing a lot of code dealing with regulations (tax/hr legal) that is other companies bread & butter so it's worth "paying their price" rather than getting it wrong and being on the wrong side of litigation/legislation.
I understand that Cloud specifically is switching to manage accounting using SAP, but most of Google runs via our own in-house systems.
Source: work at Google in payments. This is only my personal opinion.
OH YEAH, APPLE IS PROBABLY USING SAP ON THE BACKEND!!!!!!
NO WAY DUDE THEY WOULD NEVER DO THAT!!!!!!!!!
Good times.
Different story in places like Africa, where you often make a completely different app to contend with things like data caps and slow networks (e.g. Facebook Lite).
That's not true, where are you imagining this from? Hardware certainly doesn't cost the same, at the very least there are different VAT levels, but also pricing is adapted to the local market (literally just checked, i can get an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for 300€ less in Bulgaria compared to France). Software I'm unsure how to check, but Netflix costs varies by county.
And there is no such thing as consistent, EU-enforced pricing. Get out of here ...
It sounds like the main North American market is subsidizing the apps being produced and sold worldwide.
Does the same logic apply for other virtual good such as digital music elsewhere?
There's a theory of surplus in economics, which is the extra benefit that someone gets from a transaction above what they would have been willing to pay.
If I buy a game that I would have paid $100 for for $50, then I have a "$50" consumer surplus. One the other end, if the producer was willing to let that game sell as low as $40, then they have a producer surplus.
Profit seeking producers want to capture as much as the surplus as they can, and they do this through price discrimination. You see this in product as two things that are essentially the same but with different marketing etc.,
Price discrimination based on geography is quite effective though as well. People with lower incomes aren't as willing to pay high prices for games. Countries can be effectively segmented based on geography (whether virtually or not), and through this producers can charge a higher price to countries with high incomes (taking away the consumer surplus they would have had vs a lower global optimal price), and still get some value out of consumers in lower income countries.
So it's not that NA is subsidizing the market, so much as it is the company trying to squeeze the most of everyone. Now, you could call it subsidizing in that there are probably products that wouldn't be brought to market without the NA market to pay for them, but that's not really "subsidizing".
I think you'll find that this has been the practice for many decades. A stark example is medicine pricing.
On the same note, why are Levi’s jeans $100 bucks in Europe, but $40 in the USA? They’re probably coming out of the same Asian factory. Not an economist but different value propositions I guess.
Check out this brief description of how software proliferated in Poland during the early years of computers (3:09-8:27): https://youtu.be/ffngZOB1U2A
Yep. Even ad supported apps are subsidized by NA users.
You'd have to use a third party to remedy this but Apple handles it for you.
Apple handling price/international conversions and currency fluctuations seems immensely useful.
I think buyers are more accustomed to and comfortable with "round" or "standard" prices like x.99, x.88, x.95, x.00 etc rather than x.47 or x.31.
Heck, maybe they did do that, and this 900 price point system is actually the right way to do it. Doesn't seem like it, but maybe!
Because most developers are presumably experts in programming* and whatever the domain of their app is* (game, drawing program, whatever) and not experts in the psychology of pricing (unless it's a pricing app I suppose!).
Now so what? They could allow you to pick a predetermined price or type whatever integer you want into it. But I assume they think consistency makes for a better buying experience, and poor pricing choices are a kind of externality that affects everyone.
I'm slightly dubious of this "externality" really being bad but in this case I'll give the horde of Apple marketing researchers the benefit of the doubt.
* This is HN so the obvious snark has not been inserted
Just wanted to really get across that most importantly, the l and f are definitely both silent.
I’m sure sales tax is less in pretty much every US state compared to European countries, but it still doesn’t explain a $60 difference in price. It’s largely different price points based on different locales in accordance with what consumers are willing to shell out for the product.
Apologies.
Prices on eBay actually look like something a human would choose. On AliExpress on the other hand the prices are all over the place, with really odd numbers of cents, which I assume comes from automatic conversion from whatever currency they initially priced it in (not necessarily dollars at that point).
Reminds me of one of my favourite coins I had in my possession as a child, a "thrup'ny bit"!
For the uninitiated this was a pre-decimalisation three pence coin.
The other reasons for using the price point model are very convincing just not the appeal to Apple having a hoarse of marketing people.
This is insane. What prevents grey market arbitrage? Why wouldn't hardware from the country where hardware is cheapest immediately get posted on the local equivalent of eBay in the country where it is most expensive?
In any case I had no idea hardware margins were so squishy. For software, yes, profits are maximized by reducing unit prices where incomes are lower (since otherwise you won't sell any), but that's enabled by the fact that the marginal cost of unit production is very nearly zero and you're still making money even if you sell it for 25% of the rich-country price. That's obviously not the case for a laptop
Few things - mostly support and localisation support (e.g. the keyboard layout is different in iirc literally every European country, and most people want their local layout they know).
>Software I'm unsure how to check, but Netflix costs varies by county.
If it does (I don't think so, the minimal differences are because of VAT) you can subscribe from another European country (using a VPN or whatever) and Netflix can't ban you or block you from using it (like they would if you bought the subscription from a third world country for example)
Is it fair that both Finland and Italy pay 7.99€/month for the basic plan?
(This is why I said "in practical terms")
And thanks to another EU law if you subscribe to Netflix in one EU country, you get that country's Netflix Library everywhere in EU. So we can talk about "Swedish Netflix" and "Bulgarian Netflix" as two different services..
It's a bit deeper than that, let me share my perspective of purchasing software in a developing country.
Growing up I remember that video games only picked up in popularity when you could "buy" pirated games. For reference, I'm talking about the Nintendo Wii era and those were about 1-3 USD each for a CD with the pirated version of the game. Also for reference, right now a Nintendo Switch game (that costs $60 MSRP in the US) sells for about $90 due to taxes and stuff [1].
To me, there's two significant issues with that: 1. People don't feel like they are stealing when buying pirated goods. They are spending their hard-earned cash into something they want/like, and that's as far as their reasoning goes. This happens for other software like Photoshop too, and even physical goods. I remember buying fake yu-gi-oh cards knowing they were fake, but that's the only ones that were available and that I could afford. I had a few legit ones and I treated them as a treasure, in the same way you treat your fancier clothes better than your normal ones. 2. You can have a full meal in a diner for about $3 in my country, desert and all. If you want to sell food, that's how low you have to go because that's what people can afford. A $10 dollar meal is normal in the US, but here it would be a luxury.
Now, that combination is very problematic as you can expect. People do want to pay for stuff, and to their minds that's what they are doing. To me, selling pirated goods is as scummy as it gets, but I cannot blame someone for buying it when it's their only choice.
So for most companies, having "regional" prices on this markets is the difference between selling or not.
[1] Not exagerating at all, google `700 GTQ to USD` and then this https://www.max.com.gt/juego-nintendo-switch-pokemon-violet-...
Yes. That's because they aren't stealing. It's completely normal to feel like you're not stealing when you're not stealing.
The copyright monopolists would very much prefer that you felt bad when you "steal" their imaginary property but the truth is nobody other than the politicians they lobby cares about their opinion on anything.
Any attempt at price discrimination should immediately result in arbitrage.
That's every product ever made for profit by a developer in a 1st world country. It's still essentially subsidizing even if you don't like the optics of the word.
It would be subsidizing if the effect were that Americans pay more so that people in other countries pay less.
But the alternative to Americans paying more isn't the other people having to pay more, the alternative is the product not existing. (or, alternatively, the company making less profit).
There might be some cases where if the US market didn't exist, the price in another country would go up, but it would happen because a company wasn't able to sustain a lower price with the reduced quantity, and would therefore have to settle for selling less quantity at a higher price.