The editors of The Financial Times lack one of the essentials of Journalism, honesty! Customer Loyalty is being ‘tested’ according to the headline: call it by its real name whatever the traffic will bear! Apple’s price hike is predicated on their creation/cultivation of a coterie of receptive consumers, for their electronic trinkets.  Produced in the Sweat Shops of China. Those consumers lives remain incomplete, without an old toy, in its latest’s and greatest edition: New and Improved! shouts the announcer on T.V., Radio and the Internet.

The Free Market produces consumers who are driven to acquire! Apple holds nearly 300 billion dollars of profits offshore, so as to avoid American Taxation. But as the ‘in order too’ of pursuing the demonstrably collapsed ‘Growth Model‘ of Capitalism, in protracted decline, will need to create ‘a scarcity‘ by a price hike. The sub-headline of this ‘news story’ gives the game away:

A decade on from smartphone’s launch, device pricing is critical to revenue growth

Art, and social critic, Harold Rosenberg titled one of his collections of essays The Tradition of the New. The attentive reader can see, quite readily, that the Market for status objects is based on this fetish for newness: that is not just confined to the rarefied world of the Arts. Or that this fetish, the creation, care and maintenance of an appetite for securing ownership of these status objects, is one of the drivers that is the very center of modern life in The West. The created ‘scarcity’, the raising of the price of the new and improved  iPhone, can only make more attractive the acquisition of the latest status object, even if it is just an ‘upgrade’.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/4a85a978-94ef-11e7-a9e6-11d2f0ebb7f0