https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/apple-xs-and-max-review/index.html
In Apple’s last September event, Apple launched their new iPhone to the market. Apple argues that the new iPhone is a huge improvement from the precedent, iPhone X. It has a better camera, faster processor, better display, and longer battery life. Furthermore, with iOS 12, the new iPhone received a huge performance bump due to the newly published software’s enhanced stability and efficiency. With all that “amazing” new features and improvements, iPhone XS maintains the same price with the last year: $999. Lots of other Apple fans would gracefully welcome the price tag, but I personally think that the new iPhone do not deserve $999 for several reasons.
First, iPhone is not that “great” anymore compared to other Android smartphones such as Samsung, Huawei, Sony and other numerous smartphone manufacturers. When Steve Jobs first launched his iPhone in 2007, myriads of people in the world were astonished by its innovative features such as multi-touch display, all-new design messages interface, faster processor, and so on. It is not an exaggeration to say that Job’s original iPhone opened a new way that people interact with their phones. However, things got changed around 2012~2014. The performances and user interfaces were slowly caught up by other Android competitors and even some of the Android-exclusive features emerged such as face recognition (which was added several years later by Apple in 2017), retina scan (still not added yet in iPhone) and widgets (added in iOS 10 in 2016). Nowadays, iPhones are full of bugs and problems, and are not promptly responsive to the latest updates of technology. iPhones are great. Still, they have the fastest smartphone processor, brief and simple interface, and they are easy to use compared to competitors. However, iPhones do not excel in every way than the Android smartphones, but are much more costly than other Android phones (Samsung Galaxy S9 is $719.99, and Hwawei’s P20 is $850). iPhones do not deserve 100~200 dollars more than other phones.
Second, 999-dollar price tag for a smartphone is not reasonable. Consider the amount of tasks that a phone can perform and the amount of tasks that a laptop can do. If a laptop and a phone have a same price tag, which one would perform more? Definitely a laptop. Apple sells their baseline Macbook and Macbook Pro with 256GB of storage in $1299, whereas iPhone XS Max with the same amount of storage is $1249. Regarding the size and technology involved in a laptop, it is hard to think that an iPhone worths same as an Macbook. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said that “some owners of the iPhone XS Max can pay about $30 a month for it, bringing the payments down to about $1 per day, considering the amount of money they invest in their carrier programs.” Cook argued that $1 per day is same amount of the money that a cup of coffee costs, and people should not be angry with their high standards of cost because “it is not cheap to manufacture an advanced phone like this.” However, Cook’s opinion cannot be justified, because other flagship smartphones that were launched 3~5 years ago was much cheaper than this year’s smartphone. Apple always argued that they produced the best smartphone this year, and the price never exceeded $800 until 2016. Cook’s argument cannot explain the cheaper prices that were in 2016 when Apple launched iPhone 7.
The controversial price tag of newly-launched iPhone XS and XS Max triggered other companies’ gradual increase of their price of their phones too. Hwawei’s phones never exceeded 4 digits before. However, their new phone called “P20 Pro” is sold as $1150. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9 also exceeds $1000 if one orders a model with 256GB of storage or more. This phenomenon is definitely a adversarial fact for the potential smartphone purchasers because they need to pay extra 100 to 200 dollars for nothing.
iPhones are not great anymore. The price is not reasonable. However, still Apple will sell tons of their products, because Apple made it. They are the only company who ship smartphones with iOS. Apple is exploiting their monopoly of their software. Apple definitely needs to stop this practice of increasing their price of their products because it is very detrimental to the consumers. Apple’s $999 price tag on their new iPhone is not right.
Nope; 