"Bill W" wrote

The thing is, most
| people don't need the best of any of these things, but some other
| people have money to burn, and a $700 phone is pocket change, along
| with desktops that cost thousands, but if you're shopping in those
| price ranges, Apple is just one of many options.
|

Best is not synonymous with most expensive. Though
many people believe that and Apple depends on just that
misconception. A big part of their marketing is to
maintain a "top shelf" image.

Apple has a high profit margin. Because they control the
whole production process, they can charge whatever people
will pay. Android phones and Windows computers can
be made by different companies, so there's a lot of
competition. You get a lot more for your money if you
don't buy Apple, but Apple does make a very solid product in
most cases. In other words, Apple is grossly overcharging as
part of their overall strategy. It has nothing to do with quality.

iPhone profit is said to be about 50%. Non-Apple products
can't come close to that. The Windows PC market, for instance,
is a utility market with very low profit margins. I built my last
computer with something like $400 worth of parts. With an
8-core 3.8 GHz AMD CPU. One can buy a Windows computer for
about $400. And it won't be junk. It will be far more powerful
than anyone here needs. But companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP
can't afford to go too high. They have stiff competition. Dell
survives because they get suckers to overpay for far more
hardware than they need, and their customers don't understand
that, and Dell provides pretty good support.

I remember when iMacs first came out. A friend of
mine spent $2,700 to set up his system. If I remember
correctly the iMac itself was $1,600. At a time when Windows
PCs were $500-$800. The iMac wasn't better. It was a
one-piece toy that only allowed updating RAM. It didn't even
have a floppy drive because Steve Jobs wanted it to be
futuristic. Apple fans don't seem to understand that one-piece
computers are not sleek, high quality. They're bottom-tier,
non-upgradable versions of computers.

iPhones are made by virtual slave labor in China,
using other peoples' parts. (Apple, after all, doesn't
make hardware. They just assemble it and design the
container, just like HP.) And they still get 50% profit
margin for one reason only: They completely control
the production and people are willing to pay the premium.

There was a time when Macs were cheap. Back when
Jobs was not at the company they allowed "white box"
Macs. Those were as cheap as PCs because they were
the same kind of product, made with generic parts. Then
Jobs came back, locked it all down, and pushed the myth
that Apple was far superior. Remember the ads with the
snail that was supposed to be Windows? When those ads
were running, 300 MHz was the top CPU speed for Macs
while PCs were getting 1 GHz CPUs. Yet I had Mac
friends who would actually tell me that the Mac 300
could run circles around the Intel 1,000. They parroted
anything Lord Jobs told them.

Long story short, you'll get a solid, well designed product
with Apple most of the time. and just as surely, you *will*
pay more than it's worth.