I have used Macs for the past five years, starting with a MacBook Pro. The only reason I could afford it was my work had a computer purchase program that paid for the computer and allowed me to make interest free payments back to the company.
I miss that program…
And recently, I bought my second Mac. It’s a 24″ iMac monster, purchased for the sole reason of making awesome conservative videos for tons of money.
Thing is, I couldn’t afford it new. I bought it off CraigsList for a substantial discount.
See, I have 6 kids. I don’t have money to throw away.
Which is why I won’t use Orbitz in the future:
Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn’t showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site’s average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms.
“We had the intuition, and we were able to confirm it based on the data,” Orbitz Chief Technology Officer Roger Liew said.
As predictive analytics becomes more entrenched, soon phone companies will be charging iPhone users an additional 50% per call, “just because.”
BOOM! Motorola Razr Maxx, baby!
I know that Macs are more expensive than PCs, but they also last far longer. My MacBook Pro is five years old and I use it every day. On trips, I still take it. I used it at RightOnline. I’m expecting to take it to Texas next month to FreePAC.
There just better machines.
But that doesn’t mean I have expendable income. It means when I drop some cash, I want whatever I’m buying to last a while.
And Orbitz, you just lost a lot of customers with that move. I’m guessing every Mac user that reads about this will switch to another service, as they should.
Makes perfect sense to me. Over ninety percent of Mac owners voted for Obama.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of what Orbitz did. They had a hypothesis and tested it with data. There was already a correlation between platform and hotel selection. Orbitz simply capitalized on that reality to provide more relevant content (overall, not necessarily to you specifically) to visitors to their site. They didn’t change what they charged, and they retained the functionality to search/sort/filter results. Value-oriented Mac users can still get to what they’re looking for.
Also, the gray shading in your WSJ-quoted content extends a bit far. It makes it look as though the WSJ article indicated that phone companies will soon be charging iPhone users a premium. I don’t think that is actually in the article — it’s an assertion on your part, right? That seems to be a formatting slip-up.
[...] few more days of social media flame-fanning, and we got to blog posts that made statements like, “And Orbitz, you just lost a lot of customers with that move. I’m [...]