[plgonzalezrx8]

All the reasons you listed are not related to your charity at all. Basically is 1-3 and you just accidentally hit your #4 point. If it wasn't a color you liked, or you didn't need a phone, or it was more expensive, you would have not done it EVEN if it was to help.

[throwaway290]

Well, you just described the point of product red and why it is not irrelevant just because there are "proper" charities.

1 they manage to collaborate with big names like Apple that create products in demand, 2 they make sure the color is not ugly, 3 they make sure you don't pay more.

If not for product red Y-bar may not have donated to HIV/AIDS cause at all. Same for me, I always buy product red if device is available because why not, I don't care about the color much.

[waldothedog]

You’re actually reinforcing the idea: YES, it /isn’t/ charity. It’s a tiny modification to an existing behavior which individually might produce a negligible positive outcome, but cumulatively might produce a large(r) positive outcome.

I think prev post is saying: /some/ people making a trivial individual choice to produce /some/ cumulative benefit is preferable to /zero/ people making that same trivial choice to produce /zero/ cumulative benefit.

[_fat_santa]

The way I see it, most people will not go out of their way to donate to HIV/AIDS in Africa. What RED has done is bake giving into getting a product, one you would have gotten anyways. Donating could certainly be more efficient but way more people are going to buy iPhones, and be tempted to buy the RED iPhone. Less efficent but at the end of the day there is going to be more money in the pot.