Thursday, September 6th, 2007...5:27 pm

The psychology of prices and being a cheap bastard

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Mov­ing (tem­por­ar­ily) away from things polit­ical. My iBook is near­ing its last legs, its latest mal­ady being a broken latch. I bought it at the begin­ning of 1st year, hop­ing it’d last all the way through uni. At the time Macs were still held in scorn by most people, but one of the appar­ent “pos­it­ives” of get­ting one was that they “las­ted longer”.

Now that they’re over­whelm­ingly main­stream (judging by mar­ket share among law stu­dents), Apple’s become like every other man­u­fac­turer, delib­er­ately design­ing their products to be peri­od­ic­ally upgraded through planned obsolescence.

Still, I’m a Mac user for life. The black Mac­Books appeal to me, and even though they are only just over $2000, there is some­thing about the price start­ing with a ‘2’ instead of a ‘1’ that makes me unwill­ing to open my wal­let. This psy­cho­logy regard­ing prices seems to be uni­ver­sal. It’s why stores invari­ably end their prices in ‘99’. It’s why these zealots The Jour­ney­man video House of Wax down­load

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are out­raged that what they paid for a month ago is now $200 less. If you were com­pletely happy to pay $599 for some­thing when you bought it, what dif­fer­ence does it make what it costs now? It’s not like its an invest­ment asset. In terms of ration­al­ity, it is com­pletely irra­tional. I won­der if there is some multi-disciplinarian economist/psychologist out there who could explain this?

So, even though I can squeeze more out of a penny than almost any­one I know, I think I’m going to have to dig in and spend some ser­i­ous moo­lah on a new toy. Eventually.

2 Comments

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2 Comments

  • Enoch Lau
    September 7th, 2007 at 1:44 am

    I would say that it’s a rational response to be out­raged when you find out that you could have saved $200 by wait­ing a few months if the net value of the use of the product over those few months was less than $200.

    Speak­ing of flashy new toys, I’m actu­ally quite temp­ted by those new iPods that look like iPhones…

  • Dan
    September 7th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    It is a non-issue now, as Apple went into dam­age con­trol and is offer­ing every­one a $100 store credit.

    Now that they’ve slashed prices I think you might as well get the iPhone instead of the iPod Touch. There’s still a dearth of open wire­less net­works avail­able, so the Safari brows­ing on the iPod is pretty limited.

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