Where does Apple work its greatest magic? In the pricing , according to Ben Kunz of Bloomberg Businessweek on MSNBC.com (speaking of branding!):
The popular iPod Touch media player has been revamped at three price points - $229, $299, and $399 - all costing more than the iPhone, which does everything the Touch can plus make phone calls.
Or maybe people are just paying a premium to avoid getting AT&T phone service. Still, Kunz makes the case that Apple has a knack for bamboozlement—using bundling and obscurity to make prices hard to compare, offering sky-high rollout prices and then lowering them, and putting out low-end decoy products.
Decoys, in marketing, are products, services, or price points that a business doesn’t really want you to take, but rather use as a reference to make another product look better.
So that’s why my bottom-of-the-line MacBook can’t really handle tabbed browsing, and why its plastic case is warped and crumbling. It’s supposed to make people feel happier about their bigger, faster, aluminum-cased laptops. Congratulations, Mac buyers with more money than me! Glad to be of service.
