Blog Backlog: The iPhone early adopters & the demonization of profit.

Over in the Macintosh net-community there was a lot of cry about the sudden $200 drop in the iPhone's price when it happened a few months back.

The Mac community is no stranger the the concept of the "early adopter tax" where the people who gotta have the latest thing as soon as it hits the streets pay more for the privilege, knowing that the price will eventually drop.

But this dramatic drop of 1/3 the cost, a mere two months after the iPhone's debut, has caused some of those hardcore Apple fans (known in some circles as "mac-macs") to cry about how they were fleeced.

Mac-macs have been crying for an iPhone for years before Apple ever announced the product. They let Apple know about how hungry for the phone they would be. They lined up for hours for a product which was not in short supply. Why did Apple charge so much of a premium? Because people were willing to pay it.

Now so much of the cry seems to be people are shocked, SHOCKED, to see Apple working for a profit.

These people found room in their budget to buy a $600 phone. They also pay at least $60 a month to use it. When someone spends like that, they've got no business crying as if they were the exploited proletariat, railing against the plutocratic Steve Jobs.

That's the big problem with so much education today. Scientific illiteracy can be bad in society, but at least schools at least try (or give lip service to trying) to educate people in how the world works, and how science works. No such effort is given over to explaining the basics of economics. Instead we have tons of people, many of them college educated, who know nothing of economics, and view the economy in mystical terms. This has led to so much of the demonization of profit, even if it is gained honestly.

And don't give me any bull about Marx. Marx saw that so many attempts to implement socialism failed because they were unscientific. Marx tried to apply science to find a better form of socialism that would work. It still hasn't worked, and even worse, science and logic isn't really embraced by socialists, and Marx is merely used as wallpaper to make their mystical thinking look scientific.