Apple and Amazon conspired to raise iPhone and iPad prices, claims class action lawsuit Apple and Amazon stand accused of colluding to push up the price of iPhones and iPads by trying to suppress the competitive threat from resellers using Amazon's Marketplace. The class action lawsuit (PDF) filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, is being led by plaintiff Steven Floyd, who says he …
[disbelief in myself actually saying this, mode activated]
The iPhone 14 is pretty well priced IMHO; compared to $1,000 to $1,600 top Android phones you can get an iPhone 14 starting at $799. And iPhones have always had excellent cameras, seemingly a massive selling point / requirement for a lot of today's users.
[shocked at myself! Disbelief mode deactivated]
"iPhones have always had excellent cameras"
Oooh, revisionism alert!
The first iPhone had a 2MP camera without a flash. Available at the same time, the Nokia N95 had a 5MP camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and iirc, two LEDs for a flash. The N95 had GPS and mapping apps (no GPS on the iPhone 1) and access to an App store (lacking on release of the iPhone 1). iPhones became OK, the first one kinda sucked.
"who says he was denied the opportunity to buy an iPad more cheaply because of the situation."
If he knew he could get them cheaper why not use one of the cheaper vendors? Mind you I always thought that Apple were pretty strict about what price companies could sell their products at anyhow which is why the price is usually the same regardless of the site I look on.
That would be way below Apple's wholesale price. Legit third party Amazon sellers aren't going to sell at a loss, that's a quick way to bankruptcy.
Those prices were either scams of some sort (you click on the low price, then discover it is $79.99 for shipping) or they were selling stolen goods.
Amazon closed them all.
There's no way that 98% of the resellers on Amazon Marketplace were fake or stolen goods.
For that to be true Amazon's marketplace signup process would have to be so broken that literally anyone could sign up to sell fake & stolen tat, and Amazon would have had to have actually fixed this - but only for Apple devices.
That seems ... unlikely
And there's no way those 98% were all selling iPhones and iPads at 20% off retail either, so the stated claim for why they were booted doesn't hold water.
Amazon seems to have no ability to police crap in other market categories - just try buying batteries on Amazon. It is a crapshoot if you get ones that work, even if you buy brand name (supposedly people buy batteries that have been recycled and "recharge" them which for a battery that isn't rechargeable can apparently make them work for a very short time so they seem to work but last less than 1/10th as long as legit ones)
Apple might have put the screws to Amazon to kick off the bad actors, and since Amazon has no way of telling who those are they just axed them all except a few who have a favored relationship as a third party seller on their platform.
"There's no way that 98% of the resellers on Amazon Marketplace were fake or stolen goods."
Have you ever looked at what is on sale on the Amazon Marketplace?
A recent exaple, I was looking for a spare battery for my camera. The first link to come up was for a compatible battery apparently made by Duracell. I know it is a fake because Duracell don't make that particular type of battery. I ended up buying it direct from Canon's own website.
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