[birdyrooster]

I think the parent commenter is saying that in order to make a superior product these days, you need an extraordinary amount of investment for R&D which can only be made up by selling it at volumes that someone like Apple can achieve. I think their comment is about bang for your engineering buck.

[kev009]

This seems like a win for everybody. In the past a lot of people spent money on luxury goods which translated to over-paying brand name and status symbol. I would consider products like Beats headphones to be in that category; they were technically inferior to many other headphones but cost as much or more than professional headphones. It is interesting to see Apple engineering maintain broad appeal in product design while adding quite a bit of functionality.

[Wowfunhappy]

It does however mean that it's winner-take-all on the vendor end. That's troubling for the future.

[lukifer]

I think Metcalfe's Law [0] for networked services is a bigger driver for winner-take-all, than needing deep pockets to compete in a mature product category. For consumer products, a small number of large players can own entire market segments between them, but still compete with one another, as we see in other capital-intensive industries like cars or smartphones. (And it's fair to see that as its own problem; but it generally devolves to the question "if markets are universally the most efficient form of exchange, why are firms a thing?" [1].)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

[mensetmanusman]

Not necessarily, especially in areas like sound where it is essentially ‘solved’

Why should humanity put so many resources towards improvements that no mere mortal can notice? It’s probably better to put the talent on other problems...

[Alex3917]

> I think the parent commenter is saying that in order to make a superior product these days, you need an extraordinary amount of investment for R&D which can only be made up by selling it at volumes that someone like Apple can achieve.

True if you're selling average products for average people. Not true if you have a niche.