No, I firmly believe that most people buy on value - a featureset that is required, a set of "nice to haves" and then price. I've seen it from the design end of things too many times in many CE products in a wide variety of markets.
Value - what you deliver for the price - counts for a lot. Price is a big factor, but features still count with the general public.
Do you develop for CE companies? Have you been involved in those debates about competitive performance versus price discussions? It actually is a HUGE concern for most of the CE brands.
That's why the bottom half or more of the market is crap -- it's made to compete on price alone.
Crap to you; not to those who buy it. Be careful to not stretch your expectations and desires and values to the entire market. This is also a problem most Apple fans have - they think their desires are THE desires of the entire market, when the marketshare of Apple clearly indicates that is wrong.
> Crap to you; not to those who buy it. Be careful to not stretch your expectations and desires and values to the entire market.
I'm calling it as I see it. No, I don't think my desires are the desires of the entire market -- far from it.
I've designed electronics for everything from spacecraft control systems to inexpensive peripherals for PCs and everything in between, and I know what is quality and what is crap. The bottom half of the consumer electronics market is crap.
I'm not saying the bottom half of the consumers are unhappy buying crap -- indeed, they ARE happy buying crap. But they have low expectations and short memories, so when their cheap whatever-they-bought doesn't really do quite what they want after the first month, they adjust their expectations downward some more, and when it dies after a year they buy another because after all it was cheap...
Instead of buying a higher-end product that would still please them after a couple years and would last a couple years longer, and ultimately would deliver much better value.
However, at least half of the consumers out there -- the ones who provide the majority of the holy marketshare -- don't have the intelligence, or don't care, or perhaps haven't got the scratch this month, to actually assess true value and invest in a product that's worth more overall.
And look, I'm not saying they're not happy that way -- they do seem to be. And it's a free country, so they have every right to do what they're doing. No argument.
Just don't confuse that with actual "value".