早下手买入Apple最新产品值得吗？

爱思英语编者按：从历史数据来看，2000年开始，苹果主要消费类新品平均在两年零三个月以后开始降价，首次降价幅度平均为48%。而且作为最早下手的那批人，你不光要多花钱，还要承担产品不完善的成本。

The Apple Watch was officially released today. That doesn’t mean you can walk up to the counter and buy one yet—watches may not be coming to retail outlets until May—but now is as good a time as any to ask the all-important question: Should you, gentle reader, become an Apple Watch early adopter?
智能手表新时代终于到来，Apple Watch宣告正式发售。尽管这并不是说你现在随便走进一家苹果商店就能买到，很可能得等到5月才行。但现在正是我们来探讨一个重要问题的好时机：各位读者，你们应不应该成为Apple Watch的早期用户呢？

The answer may simply come down to your feelings about the product, which the reviewers tell us is a cool, somewhat flawed, but legitimately mainstream first foray into wearable technology. If the idea of literally strapping an Apple mobile device to your body doesn’t sound very appealing, then the decision isn’t complicated: Skip it for now. At the other end of the spectrum are tech junkies like me for whom a first-generation Apple Watch isn’t a question at all, but an inevitability.
答案或许归根结底要看你对这款产品感觉怎样。评论人士告诉我们，Apple Watch很酷，虽然稍有瑕疵，但绝对是可穿戴科技领域的首款主流产品。如果对你来说，把一款苹果移动产品绑在身上不是非常有吸引力，那就不难下决定：暂时不买。不过对像我这样的科技狂热者来说，买不买第一代Apple Watch根本不用问，非买不可。

But for many normal people who make rational purchasing decisions based on costs and benefits—let me know what that’s like sometime!—the Apple Watch presents a real dilemma: Do you take the plunge and get in early on the smartwatch trend, or do you wait until the kinks have been worked out?
但对众多普通人来说，买不买是基于成本和收益做出的理性购物决定（我有时也想这么理性！），Apple Watch确实让人纠结：是早下手跟上潮流？还是等你不用再纠结了再说？

A short history of Apple price cutting
苹果公司降价简史

Your decision should largely depend on two variables: How much cheaper and better will the Apple Watch be in the future, and how long will one have to wait until that future arrives?
左右你决定的应该主要基于两大变量：一是Apple Watch将来会便宜多少，性能会提高多少？二是你愿意为那个“将来”等多久？

A look at Apple’s major new product categories going back to the beginning of the millennium gives us some insight into both of these unknowns.
我们回顾一下2000年以来苹果公司的主要新产品，能对把握这两个问题有所心得。

The original iPod. Released in October of 2001, it cost $399 and shipped with five gigabytes of storage. A year and a half later, the first major hardware revision—which introduced the dock connector and a greatly improved and less break-prone interface—doubled the base model’s storage and dropped the price down to $299.
初代iPod。2001年10月上市，售价399美元，容量5GB。一年半以后进行了首次重大硬件更新，包括添加底座连接器；屏幕改善极大，而且没那么容易碎了；存储容量也增加一倍。售价降至299美元。

The iPhone. A cautionary tale for early adopters if there ever was one. Launched in late June 2007 with the 8 gigabyte model retailing for $599, the iPhone’s price was cut to $399 less than three months later. And just over a year after the original release, Apple shipped the iPhone 3G at $199, a 66% price reduction.
iPhone。如果说哪种苹果产品会让打算尽早入手的人三思的话，iPhone就是一个。容量8GB的iPhone于2007年6月底发售，零售价599美元。不到三个月价格就降至399美元。初代iPhone上市才一年多时间，苹果就推出了199美元的3G版iPhone，降价幅度达到66%。

Apple TV. Not all of Apple’s new product categories have seen their price fall quite so fast. The Apple TV didn’t get cheaper for three and a half years; but between March 2007 and September 2010 it went from basically a $299 media center PC to a $99 streaming box.
Apple TV机顶盒。并不是所有苹果新产品的价格都会如此迅速下降。Apple TV机顶盒就三年半没有降价。但当它开始降价时，一下从2007年3月的299美元降到了2010年9月的99美元。

The iPad. Some might argue that the price of the iPad hasn’t changed much at all. More than four years after its release, the base model still sells for the original sticker price of $499. That said, the many consumers who waited two and a half years for the $329 iPad Mini feel they made a very wise decision—and it’s hard to argue considering that sales estimates suggests it’s the iPad most people actually wanted.
iPad。也许有人会说，iPad的价格没有太大的变化。问世四年多以来，iPad基本款售价仍是原来的499美元。不过，许多等待了两年半的消费者以329美元买下iPad mini后，都觉得这个选择很明智。销售预期已经显示，iPad mini才是大多数人实际上想要的。

So what’s the bottom line? Well, I crunched the numbers together (you can see my admittedly unscientific methodology in the footnote below) and found that since 2000, the average major new consumer-product category from Apple fell 48% in price between the original launch and the first major price cut, which on average took 2 years and 3 months.
那么结论是什么呢？分析了这些数据后，我发现从2000年开始，苹果主要消费类新产品首次大降价的平均幅度为48%，平均时间是在产品发售两年零三个月以后。

Here’s two graphics I put together with the data:
我用这些数据做出了以下两张图。

One might look at the graphic and argue that the average obscures two dramatically different stories: The iPhone and Apple TV experienced very large price cuts, while the iPad and iPod saw more modest reductions. But even the smallest price drop, the iPod’s, was 25% in less than 18 months.
看了这两幅图后，也许会有人指出，我得出的平均数模糊了两种截然不同的情况，即iPhone和Apple TV的降价幅度非常大，而iPad和iPod的价格降幅较小。不过就算降价幅度最小的iPod，售价也在不到18个月里下滑了25%。

So there’s a clear lesson in the big picture: Early adopters have paid a significant premium to be among the first to own a new line of Apple devices.
这样一看整体情况就很清楚了，要成为苹果新产品的早期用户，你要多花很多钱。

The Product-Isn’t-Good-Yet Tax
“产品不完善”成本

Then there’s another big cost to early adopters: purchasing something that’s about to get a lot better very soon.
对早期用户来说还有一项重大成本，就是苹果很快就会发布大幅改进的新款。

To a certain extent, this phenomenon is built into every electronics purchase. The computer you buy today won’t be quite as good as the computer you could buy a few months, let alone years, from now.
从某种程度上讲，购买任何电子产品都会出现这样的情况。今天买的电脑没有几个月以后能买到的好，几年以后的电脑更是先进得多。

But it’s especially true when it comes to brand new product categories. It isn’t just that the price of Apple’s post-2000 innovations fell when the first serious revisions hit the market. It’s that the new and less expensiveversions were much better than the originals.
不过，这一点在新产品上表现得格外突出。对2000年之后问世的苹果产品来说，首次重大更新后不光伴随着降价，新版产品的性能也远超老款。

It’s hard to believe now, but the original iPhone didn’t ship with an app store, group messaging, high-speed internet, or even the ability to copy and paste text. It was also exclusive to one carrier, AT&T, which at the time was notorious for spotty service. “The iPhone was crippled when it first came out,” recalls Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive interviewed in the recently released biography, Becoming Steve Jobs. It was only a year later, when the iPhone 3G was released, “that the iPhone was truly finished.”
说起来可能难以置信，不过第一代iPhone真没有App Store、群发短信和高速上网功能，甚至不能复制粘贴文本。用户只能选择AT&T这一家电信运营商，而当时其以服务质量不稳定著称。苹果公司前高层让-路易•加西在最近出版的新书《成为乔布斯》中回忆道：“iPhone刚问世时有很多缺陷。”直到一年后3G版iPhone发售时，“才算得上真正的成品”。

One could argue the Apple Watch is similarly crippled. Cupertino’s latest widget completely depends on the iPhone for a GPS and data connection, turning the watch into a slightly souped-up timepiece when worn on its own. It’s not hard to imagine that a future Apple Watch model that could exist indepently, making it a truly revolutionary device instead of an (extremely advanced) accessory.
因此有人可能会担心Apple Watch同样出现缺陷。作为苹果的最新产品，Apple Watch的GPS功能和数据连接完全依靠iPhone，单独佩戴时只比普通手表略有型而已。不难想象，未来的新款Apple Watch应该可以独立工作，成为一款真正的革命性产品，而不只是一件（极为先进的）饰品。

The question for prospective early adopters, then, is how long are they willing to wait until the Apple Watch is also “truly finished.” And how much are they willing to pay right now?
对于纠结要不要下手的消费者来说，问题现在很清楚了：一是你愿意花多长时间等Apple Watch变成“真正的成品”。二是，你现在愿意掏多少钱买？