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Buying an Apple Product Will Always Hurt
Why the best thing Apple can do is confuse the heck out of you
Our ancestors knew the pleasure of leaves crunching underfoot. We know the delight of peeling the plastic from a new iPhone.
Eventually, that new-gadget feeling fades. The time comes to buy a newer, better product. For those in Apple’s ecosystem in particular, the process can become a blur of comparison shopping. There are eight modern iPhones to choose from if you count the Plus models and last year’s iPhone X; four Apple Watch options; five iPads; and seven Macs before you even start to adjust their specs.
Though the rate at which people replace their old phones has slowed, they’re still upgrading within two years on average, and Apple sold more than 216 million iPhones last year. The dizzying cost-benefit calculation happens all the time.
“It is very hard to know that the ‘best’ is, and this drives maximizers to look at what others have,” says Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice and a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College.
Those “maximizers” are all about identifying the best of available options, particularly when it comes to products that say something about the person who owns them — luxury goods like…
