True, but Apple products have strong aspects of both. They make some great and highly useful stuff, but there is truth in the jokes about people not buying the 4GS because other people can't tell it's better the new model. Look also at the Apple commercials, which are chock full the message that Apple products are high status. Hell, the word chosen from the dictionary to advertise the iPad is "erudite" while classical music plays in the background.
What Apple has done has brought technology into the realm of mainstream consumption, not conspicuous consumption. People have said the same thing about Macs since forever. "People buy Apple products to be noticed." When you're selling hundreds of thousands of phones each day, you no longer become conspicuous.
Jobs has said himself (I'm referencing his 1997 WWDC keynote) that it's not necessarily better to "think different". He said he didn't care about being different, he wanted to be better. And if being better was being different, then so be it.
> When you're selling hundreds of thousands of phones each day, you no longer become conspicuous.
No true. Increased availability of a product certain reduces the status associated with it, but products serving the purpose of conspicuous consumption exist at almost every level of affordability. There are some product which only the top 0.1% can afford and others which 90% of the population can afford. (Even the homeless community has a hierarchy partially defined by possessions.) Further, the degree to which a product exists to be conspicuously consumed is a continuum, in which the iPhone sits around the middle (although falling, due to it's sales).
Do you really think people, when deciding whether to buy an iPad, don't factor in the fact that all of their friends will ooh and ahh over it when they first see it?
