From "Apple’s Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect/It’s a $19 cloth" (NYT).
This is an example of the use of overcharging to buy publicity, like when a restaurant has a $1,000 hamburger on the menu.
But I'm also interested in the veneration of a scrap of cloth. I'm thinking Shroud of Turin and if I could just touch the hem of Steve Jobs's garment.
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Say what you will, but $60 is not a bad price for a well-made designer umbrella. If you're the sort of person who buys fancy scotch, $150 is not a particularly high price for a nice decanter, and the Tesla decanter does have an interesting design. It's not any different from Chevy people buying Chevy swag or VW people doing the same, aside from the fact that the average Tesla buyer probably has a higher average income than a Chevy buyer.
PS. I watched the linked video. When I landed at YouTube, I was amused that YouTube recommended I watch "La Marseillaise, sung by Mireille Mathieu. American English subtitles" after watching a man singing a gospel song.
Probably everyone knows the tune of La Marseillaise, but I don't think many people outside of the francophone world know quite how blood-drenched the lyrics are. It is a song of bloody revolution...which brings us back to Marie Antoinette, cake eaters everywhere, and "Apple cloth."
If it's the cloth Hillary wiped that server with to destroy all records of her communications with people she met with as Secretary of State who coincidentally gave hundreds of millions of dollars to her foundation that has been paying her family's expenses and providing jobs for political hacks who have been useful to the Clintons over the years, if its that cloth, it's worth $19.
Apple is going to get it's ass kicked by the phones Tesla is making.
They will have internet and phone connectivity anywhere including rural areas where everyone will be moving being hooked up to starlink.
Comcast is also on the chopping block.
Look for the entrenched corporations to push for government action against a disruptive technology.
Field of dreams, cloth of polishing. They'll come. And another one is born every minute.
"At best, it just smushes stuff around the display. My devices look no cleaner after the effort. Oh no. I spent $19 on a cleaning cloth that doesn’t even clean. I should have braced myself better after the letdown of the box. This Polishing Cloth isn’t magical. It’s not a true advancement in textile technology. It’s not even breathtaking. I spent $19 on a small piece of cloth. I’m clearly an idiot."
Well, this is one way to look at the cloth metaphor in Mel Gibson's Braveheart (photo sequence at link):
The major way heterosexual bonds are established is through two items of embroidered cloth, a piece of plaid cloth Wallace brings to his weddings, embroidered with large, unreadable letters (or some kind of design) and which the priest uses to wrap the clasped hands of the bride and groom, and a piece of cotton (like a handkerchief) that Murron has embroidered with purple thistles and which she gives Wallace. Both items are emblems of binding (the plaid cloth literally binds the hands of groom and bride and the embroidery metaphorically binds Wallace to his lost father to Wallace and to Murron). And both items are soiled in the course of the film by blood and dirt, but only is cleaned up. The piece of plaid cloth with letters has apparently been washed when Murron is buried with it. The hanky, linked to Murron since it is her gift, remains dirty throughout the film, however, and it is transmitted through men: it is dropped by Wallace unintentionally after the battle of Falkirk, picked up the Bruce, returned to Wallace by the treacherous Scottish Lord as the pledge of the Bruce, dropped by Wallace at the moment of his own beheading, and then taken out of the Bruce's sleeve by the Bruce at the battle of Bannockburn. The retention (anal?) of the hanky works along the lines of Captain Koons' (Christopher Walken) story in Pulp Fiction about the watch young Butch's father who was a prisoner of war in Viet Nam kept up his ass.
The hanky opens men emotionally and generates connections between them even as it hardens them to fight other men. When the Bruce bends over to pick up the hanky off the battlefield, his hands open as he views it and then his eye sopen as we view him. Wallace's hand opens as he looks at it after his wife is murdered, and again when drops it when he is beheaded. Similalry, the Bruce also opens the hanky before the battle of Bannockburn as a number of shots linger on the men who look soulfully at him as he holds the hanky. So the hanky works as a homosocial metaphor that tries to keep the homosocial separate from the homosexual. But because it is both dirty and cloth, it soils the feminine and links the homosocial to its opposite number, the gay King and his lover who are more concerned with their new fashions and being cleanly than they are with crushing Wallace. Heterosexual romance works only insofar as it is lost to men, who can then reopen their attachments to each other through their recycling of dirty tokens that are charged with memories of loss and a largely blocked mourning. In making women into dirt, or shit, so that they may bond men, rather than in the characterization of the women in the film, Braveheart might fairly be said to be misogynistic. Yet the misogyny of the film is coded through traditionally feminine genres, the romance and the melodrama. The ending of the fim departs from the adventure and epic film genres as it grafts itself onto the (fe)male weepie.
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/middleagesonfilm/Bravehearta.html
Why do we want photos with celebrities? Autographs?
So we can say, 'Look, I was in the same place at the same time.'
'HIS hand touched the same Sharpie that I touched.'
We somehow think that greatness and talent will rub off on us.
Unless you are actually touching Jesus, it won't.
'They will have internet and phone connectivity anywhere including rural areas where everyone will be moving being hooked up to starlink.'
Starlink will be transformative just as the internet was. It is a game changer, especially if they can keep the price down...
That's some sweet singing! I hear a bit of Otis and other STAX artists.
I don't get brand swag. OTOH, I would expect a $60.00 umbrella to be a good one, and I'd be unlikely to forget it.
Has "Mr. Hanky" been anal-yzed by some bright perfesser yet?
I get so down on this world with all the crap that we are subjected to by the insane and malicious, then I'm presented with a video that is so sweet and beautiful to hear. Somehow, everything will be better, the righteous will endure.
"This is an example of the use of overcharging to buy publicity"
Maybe so, but it's also the sort of marketing so-called "luxury" brands use to extract money from suckers who can't afford to buy the actual product. Thus, if you can't afford a Gucci handbag you could still buy a Gucci-branded eyeglass case for a mere $100.
Gucci story I heard this weekend, from a retired lady lawyer.
As soon as she started practicing in the late 1970s, she wanted to reward herself and show off her new status with a pricey bag right from the source. On a trip to Florence she went to the mother ship and started looking around.
There were no Gucci labels, and she was American and naive enough to ask about it, which was common--they looked at her with condescension. Over there, people knew without the labels.
I used to have a giveaway umbrella from the local PBS affiliate. I used it as designed, to cross the campus in the rain, which a coworker critiqued as elitist status display. He was very leftish, and a Bahai, so was dead serious.
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