Concepts

Premium Strategy

Differentiation can equal huge profits, if you it can be maintained.

  • The $550 iPhone 5C Makes Perfect Sense

    I can sympathize with the inability of many folks to grok exactly what Apple is thinking with iPhone 5C pricing. I myself was confused until just before launch, when I wrote Thinking about iPhone Pricing and honed in on the idea of “good-enough.” In the case of the iPhone, the 3G was clearly better than […]


  • HTC’s – and Windows Phone’s – Missing Market

    According to Digitimes, HTC won’t use the top-of-the-line Qualcomm processor in their new phablet: HTC reportedly will adopt an old Qualcomm processor, the quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ 8064, for production of its first large-size HTC One Max to be launched in October 2013, according to sources in the supply chain. Some sources said […]


  • Two Minutes, Fifty-six Seconds

    After endless dithering, that’s how long it took me to know the iPhone 5C would cost $549. It was at two minutes, fifty-six seconds1 that Tim Cook said there would be a video – a video! – about the iTunes Festival. And it was awesome. In case you didn’t watch the whole video (and you […]


  • Thinking about iPhone Pricing

    Before the 5C was well-known, I argued that sticking with just one new iPhone model a year had a dangerous precedent: Ford, and the Model-T: Still, the idea that Ford became overly focused on production as opposed to customer needs is a worrying one; if this fall brings nothing more than a 5S, with the […]


  • The iPad is like the iPod, not the iPhone

    Most folks seem to instinctively compare the iPad and the tablet market to the iPhone and smartphone market, and it’s easy to see why. They share the same OS, the same competitor, many of the same apps, and, of course, the same time period – the present. But in reality – and this touches on […]


  • Two Bears

    There are two Apple bear cases; only one applies to Apple, though, and the other applies to Samsung.


  • Apple and the Innovator’s Dilemma

    This paper was originally written in 2010 for a Corporate Innovation class at Kellogg Business School, and thus predates Stratechery by several years.