tecznotes

I've barely mentione iPods once in a few years of writing here, but this struck me as interesting. John Gruber has an article on Apple's pricing strategy in which he says:

The two Gartner researchers even lamented Apple's decision to discontinue the 1 GB nano, which they say could have been a nice mass-market item for around $99. Why not sell a 512 MB version, too? And what about 3 GB and 6 GB? And what about more colors?

...and:

...a 33 percent price reduction is not a small cut, and it would throw off their nice, even 2/4/8 GB for $150/200/250 pricing scheme.

I'm impressed that Apple designs their prices with the same attention to detail they use to design the rest of their stuff. I feel naturally more comfortable thinking about a price scale that looks as clean as "150/200/250" instead of one that requires a universe of useless choices. Apparently I'm not a rational economic actor.

From John:

The organizers asked me to design a flyer to hand out at the march. I took it as an opportunity to do something a little different from a typical flyer. ... The text is styled in the form of a redacted government document. It creates a parallel text that plays on themes of secrecy, coverup, and suppression of dissent, as well as seeing through the lies and reading what is erased.