Karl Smith playfully suggests that it is ironic that Steve Jobs has so many fans among Austrian economists: Apple was principally the complete opposite of the decentralized local-knowledge driven catallaxy that Austrian’s trumpet. It was a highly centralized, tightly controlled integrated company that managed every step of the process from design to retailing. …Apple seemed [...]

Tags: Alchian, Apple, central planning, Coase, Hayek, Jobs, Smith, The Meaning of Competition, The Nature of the Firm, The Use of Knowledge in Society, Uncertainty Evolution and Economic Theory
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If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed last week that I have an app in the new Mac App Store. It’s called Gmail Dock, you can find more info about it here and here, and you can buy it here. I am an economist, not a programmer, so what am I doing [...]

Tags: App Store, Apple, Coase, economics, Gmail Dock, Mac App Store, Nature of the Firm, transaction costs
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On Saturday, I wrote a post asking why Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads. My answer was that they do this to decrease the value of the secondary market. I wrote the post for my usual readership, which is highly economically literate. Surprisingly, this post received about 100 times more attention than usual, [...]

Tags: Apple, durable goods problem, economic profit, engraving, Hacker News, iPad, iPod, Louis Vuitton, monopoly, secondary market
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This Black Friday, I had the occasion to ponder why it is that Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads (hereafter, iP*ds). A small part of the reason is surely that it adds value for some of its customers. But assuming that the cost of engraving is not zero, this is not much of [...]

Tags: Apple, Bulow, Coase, durable goods problem, engraving, iPad, iPod, secondary market
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My AT&T contract is up, and I’m trying to decide what to do to replace my iPhone 3G. The iPhone 4 beckons, but there’s a 3-week wait, and Android is very appealing as well. Notifications on iOS suck, and how long will it be before I can use Priority Inbox on my phone? In fact, [...]

Tags: Android, Apple, bad taste, Google, iPhone, Scoble, Siegler
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Today, Apple announced the new incarnation of their so-called hobby, the Apple TV. The new device is focused on streaming, which is a welcome improvement from Apple’s erstwhile expectation that users manage a library of multi-gigabyte movie files. But the more I think about it, the more I doubt that the iTunes Store that is [...]

Tags: Apple, bundling, iTunes Store, MacHeist, Netflix, Spotify
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The very clever Josh Knox points me to Steve Jobs’s open letter about Flash. Following up on my last post on double marginalization, he wonders if Apple’s distaste for Flash can be explained in those terms. Josh is absolutely correct. The money sentence in Jobs’s letter is this: Though the operating system for the iPhone, [...]

Tags: Adobe, Apple, double marginalization, economics, Flash, Jobs, Knox, open standards
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