Why Apple is wrong to think Black Friday is beneath it

Welcome to what we are now apparently calling Black Week, our annual festival of paying slightly less for things we don’t need. It’s the most magical time of the year, when children stay up late hoping to hear the sound of deals on the roof and it snows discounts.

It’s easy to be cynical about Black Friday. Easy… and correct. Gone are the days when Black Friday was a unique opportunity to save serious money on big-ticket purchases; when a store would slash 85 percent off flatscreen TVs and cause a literal riot. Most of today’s deals stick around for practically the entire month or longer, and improve only slightly on the discounts available the rest of the year, if they improve on them at all.

Nowadays, as savvy shoppers will know, Black Friday is all too often treated as an opportunity to shift outdated stock at an inflated price. Retailers will use every trick in the book: increasing prices in October and then “discounting” from that; comparing against an old MSRP and conveniently forgetting to mention that the manufacturer has dropped the price; pretending to have less stock than they really have to induce a sense of urgency; pushing last year’s model without any explicit reference to its year of release or the fact that it’s been discontinued and replaced by something much better. You need to be on your toes.

But cynicism has its limits, and we should acknowledge that there are still worthwhile deals out there if you know where to look. Maybe you won’t find 85 percent off a flatscreen TV, but you might spot $300 off the M4 MacBook Pro or a pair of AirPods Pro 2 for just $170. Provided you take the time to check against past pricing, and the expertise to know if the product is worth having (or just know a reputable Apple-focused website that’s done the work for you), you can save a significant amount of money.

One place where you won’t save any money at all, however, is Apple.com. Apple nominally takes part in Black Friday each year, but its promotional event is just a gift card giveaway. The prices don’t drop at all; you just get a voucher that knocks a little money off your next purchase. And for most recent products you don’t even get that. Come on Apple, where’s the Black Friday goodwill?

My suspicion is that Apple feels all this discounting is somehow beneath it. That knocking money off is a sign of desperation or cheapness. That the premium Apple brand will be damaged by cheap and cheerful messaging, and customers will become disinclined to pay full price the rest of the year. That it wants to be more like Cartier and Bentley, which don’t discount products, than Samsung and Google, which do.

The problem with that strategy, though, is that it just drives customers elsewhere. We’ve found plenty of worthwhile discounts on a wide range of Apple products by going to other retailers, and sensible customers will do likewise. Apple still gets paid when a reseller makes the sale, of course, but it has to share the profit and it loses an opportunity to upsell on other items. Sorry—introduce the customers to the many benefits of the Apple ecosystem.

But ultimately, my main issue with Apple’s refusal to give discounts is that it feels arrogant. There was a time when we all had plenty of cash and Apple was able to lock customers into its walled garden. Now the walled garden is weakening and the cost of living is spiraling, meaning we all have both the means and the motive to buy elsewhere. Even a small actual discount for Black Friday would go a long way in building goodwill and giving loyalists a reason to stick around for the rest of the year.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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Is Apple finally going to make a real effort into the smart home market? In the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast, we examine a few recent reports on some rumored products: an iPad-like control center, smart home cameras, an Apple television set, and more!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

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And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.