Product Strength Has Never Had Anything to Do with Price

I have always held that product strength has nothing to do with price.

Almost every time I say this, someone pushes back — because in today’s tech and automotive circles, people have grown used to lumping product strength, value for money, and “is it worth buying” into a single discussion, when in fact they are not the same concept at all.

As I see it, product strength describes the product itself: its product definition, industrial design, engineering execution, and the final experience. What the product is, what problem it solves, whether it accomplishes its own design goals — these together constitute product strength. Price is merely a commercial strategy. It affects whether consumers are willing to buy, not the product itself.

Take the simplest example: the same phone sells for 6,000 yuan today and drops to 3,000 tomorrow. It is still the same phone. A price cut doesn’t make the screen better or the chip faster; the camera, the weight, the software experience — none of it changes. If the product itself hasn’t changed, how could its product strength suddenly become stronger just because the price dropped?

The MacBook Neo is a textbook case. Apple never intended it to be a performance flagship; the goal was to lower the barrier of entry and bring more people into the Mac ecosystem. The A18 Pro, the thin-and-light body, the long battery life — these are all trade-offs made in service of that goal.

Sell it at 9,999 yuan today, and it is this computer. Sell it at 2,999 tomorrow, and it is still this computer. What changes is whether it’s worth it — not what it is.

Two Kinds of Price: Design Input and Sales Output

What genuinely causes confusion here is that there are actually two entirely different “prices.”

One happens before the product is designed; the other happens after.

The first is part of the product definition itself. When a product is greenlit, Apple first determines the price band the MacBook Neo will occupy, then works backward to decide what chip, what display, what chassis it should use. Choosing the A18 Pro over an M-series chip was no accident — it was an engineering trade-off made under price constraints. Price in this sense genuinely participates in shaping the product.

The second is the selling price after the product is finished. Once a product has been designed and put on sale, whether it sells for 9,998 yuan today or 2,999 tomorrow, nothing about the computer gets redefined. The chip hasn’t changed, the display hasn’t changed, the engineering trade-offs haven’t changed.

So when I say “product strength has nothing to do with price,” I am always referring to the second kind of price, never the first. A pricing target can participate in a product’s birth, but a selling price cannot reach back and change a product that already exists. What actually changes is the consumer’s judgment of its value — not its product strength.

What Many People Are Evaluating Isn’t the Product

The standard iPhone is another classic example.

At every launch, people used to criticize it: no high refresh rate, bezels wide enough to land an aircraft carrier, incremental spec bumps — some slapped the “e-waste” label on it outright. But suppose Apple cut its price to 2,999 yuan tomorrow. The comment sections would tell a different story: “At 5,999, e-waste. At 2,999, phone of the year.”

Yet nothing about the phone has changed. Still no high refresh rate, the bezels are still there, the specs are the same specs.

So what many people call “product strength” isn’t an evaluation of the product at all — it’s an evaluation of the price.

This is something I’ve observed with increasing frequency in recent years: “product strength” is becoming an overused buzzword. People used to say “great value for money,” then the meme phrase “so good, actually” (真香) took over, and now more and more people say “strong product strength.” The vocabulary keeps getting more professional, while the question being discussed keeps getting simpler. At its core, it’s still just: is this price a good deal?

So when a product’s price drops, they say its product strength got stronger; when the price rises, they say its product strength declined. But what actually changed was never the product — it was the perception of value formed between the product and its price.

Even “Value for Money” Itself Lost Its Meaning Long Ago

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that “product strength” isn’t the only concept that has been distorted — the meaning of “value for money” itself changed long ago.

Value for money was originally a relative concept: the ratio of performance to price. By that definition, an expensive product can absolutely offer great value for money, as long as its gains in performance exceed its increase in price.

But in reality, people almost never describe a high-priced, high-spec product as “great value for money” — which tells you that the popular understanding of the term stopped being that ratio a long time ago.

Strictly speaking, at the same price, higher performance means a higher ratio. But in everyday discussion, performance has gradually turned into a pass/fail line of “good enough.” Once a product clears that line, the only thing left to discuss is price. And so “performance ÷ price” quietly became “once my needs are met, whichever is cheaper.”

The reason is simple. Price is an objective number — 2,999 is 2,999 — while some kinds of “performance” are very hard to map onto a price. How much is a high-refresh-rate display worth? How much is a better camera system worth? There will never be a consensus answer. Naturally, the discussion drifts toward the one metric everyone can agree on: price.

And so “value for money” slid all the way down into “low price,” while “product strength” slid all the way down into “value for money.”

What emerges here is a rather interesting chain of semantic drift: product strength is about the product; value for money is about the relationship between product and price; low price is about price itself. Each swap of terminology sounds a bit more professional, yet the thing actually being discussed never changes.

After all that circling around, what many people really want to say comes down to one word: cheap.

Evaluate the Product First, Then the Price

Before evaluating any product, one question should be answered first: is it a good product?

This is a discussion of whether the product definition is clear, whether the engineering trade-offs are sound, and whether it ultimately accomplishes its own design goals.

Only after that question is answered does the second one come into play: is it worth this price?

That is where budget, competitors, market conditions, and value for money belong.

Both questions matter, of course — but the order cannot be reversed.

“Worth buying” is built on top of the product itself, and changes in selling price cannot reach back and alter product strength. A product can become more worth buying because of a price cut, or less recommendable because of a price hike, but it does not thereby gain stronger or weaker product strength.

This is why I prefer to define product strength as the capability of the product itself, and value for money as the relationship between the product and its price.

Only by evaluating the product first and the price second — rather than letting price define the product in reverse — are we actually discussing the product, and not its price tag.