This is undeniably hilarious, but if you’ve ever seen actual dissection photos or videos of surgery, you kinda recognize that good anatomical drawings required a lot of mental effort to create.

Imagine making a completely accurate diagram of everything in a car’s engine bay, either while the engine is running and it’s doing 70mph down the highway, or after it’s had a head-on collision at the same speed.

We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers.

And actually, the fact that the price hasn’t increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.

Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?

The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it’s that much.

There’s tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.

The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/

The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.

The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US

Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?

And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don’t follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that Apple’s costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.

But here’s the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.

Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.

And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:

Do you have a charging cable?

Is it an Apple cable?

Are you sure you have one that’s USB-C and supports USB Power Delivery?

And it’s not worn out?

You say your dog chewed on it a little but it’s mostly intact and still works?

Well, I’d recommend getting a new one anyway.

Yeah you can get your own if you want but it’s best if you get an Apple cable.

OK great, that comes out to $820 total. And do you want to insure your phone for $5 a month?

It’s fine if they reduce the price accordingly.

If it’s still the same price after they take the cable out, it was never about reducing waste to begin with.

Knowing Apple, that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, which is why I never have and never will own any of their products.

I feel like you either fear and/or despise generative AI, or you think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

There seems to be very little in-between.

It’s an ideal that’s only achievable when you’re able to set your own priorities.

Managers and executives generally don’t give two shits about yak shaving.

Tip #1: if you’re gonna post your programming blog to social media, make sure it can handle the traffic…?

Here’s another thing that I was just reminded of in this very thread, lmfao:

Men are expected to accept unsolicited advice at face value when they want to vent, because we’re supposed to be the ones with all the answers, and if a man is complaining about a problem, then he’s obviously just missing the answer.

This actually blew up my last relationship, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when my girlfriend at the time was stressed from being laid off and we weren’t able to see each other due to the isolation orders.

She would try to vent to me about her problems, looking for support in a time of emotional vulnerability, and I, an inexperienced idiot just trying to be helpful, would suggest solutions that I thought she hadn’t considered. If you can’t guess exactly how that went, you’ve almost certainly never been in a serious relationship.

What made it worse is she would then say to stop mansplaining, which made me defensive because I thought she was tacitly accusing me of being intentionally misogynistic when I was honestly just trying to be helpful. At the time, I figured I just needed to adjust my approach a little bit, not completely change course. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work.

It was only in hindsight, some time after she had dumped my dumb ass, and I had blocked and deleted her number, that I was complaining to my friends and getting the exact same kind of thing back that I realized, “oh wow, I get it now, that is actually really fucking annoying and invalidating.”

It was also around this time, while discussing my experiences with friends who have been diagnosed, that I realized that I might have ADHD. So that definitely hadn’t helped.

In the extremely unlikely event you’re reading this, K, I’m sorry. I figured out what I did wrong, just a little too late.

As a guy who’s trying dating again, there’s something that keeps coming up that kinda bugs me: talking to women who just put in the bare minimum of effort, expect me to carry the conversation and make all the first moves.

I don’t give two shits about traditional gender roles and I’m all about subverting them. However, I think if you’re in the same boat but still wanna call yourself a “passenger princess” and expect the guy to do everything, you’re kind of a hypocrite.

Yeah but that’s just putting the problem of defining it onto governments.

If a court orders the exhumation of a murder victim, is that technically archeology?