Here’s a hot shopping tip that I’m sure most of you readers don’t have access to: Apple is currently offering discounts on iPhones in China. But I’m not bringing this up because I want to influence anyone’s shopping behavior. I think it’s noteworthy for other reasons.
It may seem odd that I find it noteworthy that a company is offering one of their products at a discount. Isn’t that what companies do all the time? Not with Apple. Apple rarely (in fact, almost never) sells its devices at discounts. For example, consider the “Black Friday” shopping experience in the United States, which typically marks the start of the holiday shopping season before Christmas. Many mobile phone companies offer significant discounts during this event. In fact, in recent years, these holiday discount prices have appeared well before Black Friday and continue well past Thanksgiving weekend. Google and Samsung not only offer their phones at heavily discounted prices, but they also frequently offer bundle deals and increased trade-in values for old phones.
last yearFor example, Google cut the price of its high-end flagship phone, the Pixel 8 Pro, by $200 despite it only being on the market a month ago, and its foldable smartphone/tablet hybrid, the Pixel Fold, by $400. Meanwhile, Apple only ran a promotion over the actual Thanksgiving weekend, selling items at full price rather than discounting products, but certain purchases came with an Apple gift card that could be used to buy more Apple products. So if you bought a new Apple TV 4K, you’d also get a $50 gift card to Apple.
So why is Apple offering hundreds of dollars worth of discounts on its top-of-the-line iPhones in China, when it doesn’t offer any such discounts in the U.S. during a typical holiday sale? encounter Intense and growing competition from companies like Huawei, which they would never face in the US market, because the US government bans these companies from competing in the US market for apparently flimsy “national security” reasons (though It pointed out In “Protectionists Ban Chinese Garlic, Not Chinese Electronics, for ‘National Security’ Reasons,” by John Murphy, the result is that Chinese consumers can get iPhones at a cheaper price than American consumers because the Chinese government allows more Chinese garlic in. competition There are more companies in the mobile phone market than the U.S. government allows, and Apple’s move appears to be working, with Chinese consumers Responded We’re in favor of the price cuts, but it’s unfortunate that American consumers aren’t getting the same benefits from this competition.
I wrote in front On the face of it, the Department of Justice’s argument that “barriers to entry” prevented companies like HTC and Microsoft from competing with Apple in the U.S. is absurd. In short, I argued there that it is absurd that Microsoft, which had been selling smartphones for years and had established a customer base of millions long before the iPhone was introduced, faced “barriers to entry” that prevented it from competing with the iPhone. This is not to say that there are no barriers to entry in the mobile phone market. However, the most significant barriers that exist today are caused by government regulations. Before removing the dust from the market, the government should first look at the planks created by its own policies.
