Unfortunately for high priced premium products, the increase in quality of basic products forces premium products to be better or fail.
Related to your example - $1 burgers are increasingly better, than you would expect. The difference between McDonald's midrange line and, say, a burger at a restaurant for $18 is negligible in flavor. I can no longer justify going to a restaurant and pay $18+tip for a burger.
Sure, to you. There's a whole lot of not you out there for whom the distinction is worth the price differential. That's true in both hamburgers and hardware. Needs, goals, and use cases differ significantly among people.
I'd argue that the functional difference between a Honda Fit and a Tesla is less than the difference between the best McDonald's hamburger and an $18 hamburger. That's why I drive a Honda Fit. In the face of Tesla's increasing sales it would be pretty strange to assert that my taste was somehow universal.
I would argue a many, perhaps most, people that won't eat a McDonald's hamburger because of some perceived lack of quality probably haven't had one in many years and are instead working off public perceptions and status indicators about what they think it represents and must be like.
And then we've come full circle to Apple products.
I'm a classically trained chef who tends to specialize in bar food. I know more about the marketing, creation, and perception of food than you do— you're wrong.
McDonald's has very high quality preparation standards. Their ingredients and techniques were constructed to facilitate their high-speed, high-consistency process, but prevent them from incorporating things that the overwhelming majority of burger consumers prefer.
For example, the extremely fine grind on the meat, the thin patty, the sweet bread, the singular cheese selection, the inability to get the patty cooked to specification, the lack of hard sear or crust and the maillardization that accompanies it, etc. etc. etc. At a minimum, people prefer juicier burgers with coarser, more loosely-packed texture, usually cooked to lower temperatures (though this depends on what part of the country you're in,) and the flavor and texture differential from a hard sear, be it on a flat top or grill, and toasted bread.
For consumers who, at least at that moment, have a use case that requires their food be cheap, fast, and available, well we know who the clear winner is.
In my new career as a software developer and designer, I use apple products. I am willing to pay for the reliable UNIXy system that can also natively run industry-standards graphics tools without futzing around with VMs and things, and do all that on great hardware. There will always be people who aren't going to compare bits pushed to dollars spent and are going to be willing to spend the extra few hundred bucks on a device they spend many hours a day interacting with.
This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
> I know more about the marketing, creation, and perception of food than you do— you're wrong.
I don't doubt you know more about food. If you applied that knowledge to my actual point instead of what it appears you assumed my point was, this assertion might have been correct.
That's not entirely your fault, I was making a slightly different point than the exiting conversation was arguing, so it's easy to bring the context of that into what I was trying to say and assume they were more related than they were.
The belittling way in which you responded though, that's all on you.
> This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
My point, applied to this, would be to question what other products you've tried? My assertion is that people perceive other products to be maybe 50%-70% as good, when in reality they are probably closer to 85%-95% as good (if not better, in rare instances). That is a gap between perception and reality.
As applied to burgers, I was saying that people that refuse to eat at McDonald's because of quality probably have a very skewed perception of the actual differences in quality in a restaurant burger compared to a McDonald's burger.
I'm fully prepared to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time. I also don't see how anything you said really applies to my point, so I don't think you've really proven I'm wrong yet.
So you're creating metaphors that don't make sense using things that you have a limited understanding of to describe something you think you might be wrong about and getting annoyed that everybody else isn't following along with your deep conversational chess. Right then. I'm going to go ahead and opt out of this conversation.
Feel free. I simply made an observation that was loosely connected to the existing converaation and noted how it seemed to parallel something else.
I wasn't annoyed by you misunderstanding, I was annoyed by you misunderstanding, assuming you understood my position completely because it would more conveniently fit with your existing knowledge, and then using that assumed position to proclaim your superiority and my foolishness.
It's not about deep conversational chess on my part, it's about common decency and not assuming uncharitable positions of others by default on your part. A problem, I'll note, that you repeated in the last comment.
Just the mere perception of quality will increase your satisfaction levels. The perception of lack of quality will reduce you satisfaction levels.
Thus I still maintain that your "perfect" $18 burger is only marginally better than McDonald's midrange burger. The fact that you actually spend time on making that burger more appetising - is proof that the low cost foods are getting better and better.
While focusing on my analogy, you literally prove my overall point.
30 years ago you weren't necessary, as low cost food wasn't nearly as good as today. Now - you have to exist to justify that premium.
I think you're reading more into my comment than what I actually said, possible because of someone else's prior comment in this thread.
I was making a point less about McDonald's being equivalent to a restaurant burger and more about people's perceptions of McDonald's and how bad it is. That is, there's probably a lot less difference in the taste of those burgers than a lot of people want to admit.
The other aspect to consider is consistency. I had a $14 burger at a restaurant on Saturday that I would have been happy to swap in any single burger I've ordered from McDonald's in the last 12 months. You may not consider it high quality at McDonald's, but you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get.
All I'm really doing is making a point that there's a bit of fetishism about luxury items going on these days. Are Apple devices generally higher quality than many competitors? Yes. Is the difference in quality in line with most people's perception of the difference in quality? I don't think so.
I haven't had a McDonald's hamburger for many years. You are partly correct that it is because of my perception that it is trash. But when I walk by a McDonald's it doesn't smell like food to me anymore and smells more akin to garbage on a warm day.
> The difference between McDonald's midrange line and, say, a burger at a restaurant for $18 is negligible in flavor.
This may be the single worst analogy I've ever seen.
There is no amount of money you can pay at McDonalds to get a good quality burger.
I don't spend $18 for burgers, since there are a million places where you can pay $5-8 dollars and get a damned good piece of beef. But not at McDonalds.
If the employees are doing it right, it’s not “that bad” of a burger. So, just pay the employees enough to actually care about the burger and it comes out decent.
I’ve eaten at McDonald’s around the world, it really depends but they do have good burgers when they’re cooked right.
It's not the employees. In different countries the entire recipe and production system is different. In many non-US countries, McDonald's is a more upscale "foreign" restaurant and far more expensive than in the US.
