Apple discards the college business

Macintosh

Silly-priced new MacBook Air.

Apple just announced the new MacBook Air and it’s priced at an over-the-top $1200 for the base model with a 13.3″ display.

You will not be seeing this much more:

Yes, this silly-priced MacBook Air confirms that Apple is strictly in the Veblen Goods market, where a premium price is seen as attractive, a low one as a disincentive to conspicuous consumption.

Consider: Wireless ear bud speakers at $120. Cellphones starting at $800 + tax + annual service contracts. The Apple Pencil to draw on your iPad at $100. All commanding 50% profit margins because someone has to pay for that ridiculous over-the-top flying saucer HQ:


Hubris. The Apple HQ building in Cupertino.

I’m writing this on a 2010 Mac Pro tower. In its faultless 365/24/7 life it has had one upgrade of GPU, CPU, RAM and SSD storage. I expect it to continue to deliver fault free daily performance for another decade, at 70% of the speed of the latest throwaway machines. When parts fail – and they seldom do – they are easily replaced with a screwdriver or two and readily available. The chassis design dates from 2006.

My MacBook Air is the last 11″ 2015 model made. I would upgrade this $800 machine annually as, with associated tax benefits, the upgrades were free. Then the 11″ was discontinued never to appear again. It weighs just 2.38lbs and is a handy portable companion. At 11″ a costly ‘Retina Display’ would be money wasted. It’s the perfect traveling machine whether for college student or businessman. But you can no longer buy it new. So now the aspiring student will buy a Chromebook with comparable specs to the new MacBook Air for, what, $450?

In a decade Apple has abandoned its core constituency, the pro A/V market. It has abandoned college students and the impecunious. And now it sells ridiculously overpriced, glass-backed, fragile cell phones for $1000 and up.

Strange business model for the coming recession.

Strategy? Given that technology changes at the margin for desktops, laptops, tablets and cellphones are very slow, I’m increasingly focused on upgrading to 2-3 year old tech, as I did in moving from an iPhone6 to an iPhone7 for a modest $300 net a few weeks back. No $1000 cellphones for me. I get 80% of current performance for 30% of the cost. That solves.

The secrets of America’s wealth

Photographs

Just a handful of events did it.

When you look at the causes of success in the wealthiest nation there has ever been, there are but a handful:

  • The Revolutionary War. Kicking out the British and keeping taxes for ourselves stopped colonial plunder for once and for all.
  • The Louisiana Purchase. President Thomas Jefferson consummated the deal amidst the usual calls for impeachment and rendered America essentially immune from invasion unless you consider Canadians and Mexicans a threat. Nappy proceeded to waste the cash on interminable war with England and an idiotic attempt to capture the misery that was and remains Russia. America gained a vast swath of territory from Louisiana to North Dakota. The cost was less than 9 months of our current criminal spending on perpetual war.
  • Lincoln’s Secretary of State gave his name, albeit unwittingly, to the purchase of Alaska from the Russkies in 1867. The cost of $100 million in today’s money saw ‘Seward’s Folly’ remove the Russian Bear from North America and delivered vast sums of gold and oil soon after.
  • NASA and the Apollo program. The Russkie Bear did America a great favor in beating us to space time and again – the first unmanned space vehicle, the first man in space, the first spacewalk, etc. at goodness knows what cost to life. It lit a fire under us, stoked by JFK, who said we would put a man on the moon within a decade. The US space program was the Cold War at its most hot and, as with all wars, technology proceeded by leaps and bounds. It’s hard to begin to relate the gains to US GDP from Apollo, but the development of just one technology says it all. The microchip.

These thoughts ran through my mind when I snapped the images below for they speak loudly to the most significant of the wealth creators enumerated above, the first. The other three would have been impossible without it.

When a bunch of throughly pi**ed off Americans chucked 342 chests of English tea (from China, of course, stolen by the British in the first place) into Boston Harbor the movement for independence from a tyrannical colonial power was firmly entrenched. There would be no more taxation without representation and the English protection racket was doomed.

“Your taxes pay for protection”, the English King told us. Uh huh. (‘Colonialism’ is little more than a euphemism for theft).

While the original boats are long gone there’s a replica to be seen in the harbor:

Taken from a high floor of the Intercontinental Hotel, Boston.

Panny GX7, 12-35mm pro zoom.

School – early morning

Photographs

New England light.

The nights and mornings in New England are cold by now, frost in evidence as the sun rises.

Having attended breakfast with the Dean at an indecently early hour, I stumbled out of the deanery at my son’s school and this is what I saw:


Early morning.


Alumni Hall serves some of the best meals in New England.


This girls’ dorm dates to 1882.


Seen through the frame of the Admissions Building.


Another view of Alumni Hall.


More like 7am …. The Memorial Chapel is made from local Connecticut River granite.
Like almost every prep school in the area, NMH is now secular.


The Forslund Gym faces the magnificent playing fields. NMH is in the Pioneer Valley.


First autumn colors.

I am a big believer that the spirit of place is a key component of a happy mind and how could you go wrong on this beautiful campus in central Massachusetts?

Panny GX7, 12-35mm pro zoom.