With regards to hardware I always lived by the mantra ‘if you pay peanuts you get monkeys’. In other words I might pay more for Apple hardware initially but I find that even a decade after purchase it remains useful for everyday tasks. My youngest son types up his homework on a 2006 MacBook and it works brilliantly on 10.5; I’d hate to imagine what the performance of a Windows XP machine from the same era would be. This also has the effect that 2nd hand Apple gear is often a much better buy than new simply because of how good it was to start with.
Apple’s margins are high but then its not just material components you’re paying for; its R&D, wages, shipping, manufacturing costs and so on. Its not a fair comparison.
What Apple have forgotten about though is gateway products. It was ok selling a $2k laptop in 2007 because you could buy the cheapest iPod for $50. The original iPhone was only $300 which in todays money puts it at about $500 but still. Jobs knew that he wasn’t going to expand his company on $2k laptops. He needed to expand the idea of Apple and give more people access to its design and engineering to upsell them later. They don’t do this anymore and Apple products are only available to those on low incomes through debt accumulation which is not a great way to sell anything bar property.
And over on the software side that 30% ‘tax’ works like a regular tax and actually pays for the infrastructure in which we live. (On a political note low tax governments just end up borrowing more to fund impoverished services; its a myth that lower taxes build better societies as we can see from the comparison of American and British society to those of the high-tax Nordic countries) The 15% I pay to Apple gives me lifetime hosting, bug-finding, API upkeep and if my app gets chosen, free marketing. If my app was a CD release in Walmart it would last 2 weeks before being dumped in a bargain bin never to be seen again. As a buyer I know that 99.9% of the apps I download from the App Store are bug-free and have been rigorously tested.
The Apple I defended though no longer exists. Those RAM and storage upgrade prices are a joke. I’d always recommend buying an older Mini (to the average user) and then you can upgrade the RAM yourself pretty easily.
