Your Apple Products Are Getting More Expensive. Here's How They Get Away With It. (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has never made cheap stuff. But this fall many of its prices increased 20 percent or more. The MacBook Air went from $1,000 to $1,200. A Mac Mini leaped from $500 to $800. It felt as though the value proposition that has made Apple products no-brainers might unravel. For some perspective, we charted out the past few years of prices on a few iconic Apple products. Then we compared them with other brands and some proprietary data about Americans' phone purchase habits from mobile analytics firm BayStreet Research.

What we learned: Being loyal to Apple is getting expensive. Many Apple product prices are rising faster than inflation -- faster, even, than the price of prescription drugs or going to college. Yet when Apple offers cheaper options for its most important product, the iPhone, Americans tend to take the more expensive choice. So while Apple isn't charging all customers more, it's definitely extracting more money from frequent upgraders.

[...] Apple says prices go up because it introduces new technologies such as Face ID and invests in making products that last a long time. Yet it has clearly been feeling price discomfort from some quarters. This week, amid reports of lagging sales that took its stock far out of the trillion-dollar club, it dedicated its home page to a used-car sales technique that's uncharacteristic for an aspirational luxury brand. It offered a "limited-time" deal to trade in an old iPhone and get a new iPhone XR for $450, a $300 discount.

Comments

Moving on...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been an Apple fan for years because the hardware *just works*. But back then I could at least upgrade the harddrives, add a gpu, ram etc. My last Mac was a Mini from 2012 with an i7 cpu (faster than the mini which came out in 2014 and fast enough that upgrading to the new mini is akin to throwing out money).

But over the last few years Apple has become increasing hostile to users. Gluing the batteries into the laptop case, soldered memory, middle of the road gpus etc. And now I'm seeing Apple charge $600 for a 1TB ssd upgrade for the new mini when that same drive is $150 on Amazon. GPU's now come in their own $600 case outside of the damn hardware — and now this T2 chip from hell which prevents user or third-party upgrades/fixes?! What. The. Hell. Apple. I suspect this will get much worse as Apple uses the fear of encryption + hackers to lock down their hardware even further under the pretence they are making you safer.

That said, I've been honing up on Linux the last few months and will build a rig in the new year and fully switch to Linux. It's the first time I'll use Linux as a *desktop* OS as opposed to a cloud service. Linux has come so far in recent years that in my testing I haven't found anything lacking (hell, Steam runs fine on it!).

I don't want to crap on Apple for invoking their right to be a capitalist company, I'm sure the shareholders are happy. But I'm done handing my money over to a trillion dollar company (I'll give it to Amazon instead — irony is not lost on me here...).

Re:It's pretty simple

[Oswald McWeany]

Most are treated as knock-offs because they actually are - witness the notch nonsense, which wasn't even Apple's idea to start with. And then how every manufacturer suddenly came out with a laptop that like a MacBook Air - some of them are still embarrassingly obvious MacBook Pro clones.

If I ran a competing company and could poach any one employee from Apple- it would be their head of marketing.

What you say is true, other companies do copy Apple. (sure Apple copies the competition too- but there is more Apple mimicry than the other way around).

It's not that Apple is the only company with good ideas, and it's not that all the features copied from Apple are good ideas- some of them are terrible, but other companies copy them nonetheless. Somehow much of society has the idea that Apple is the end product that others should strive to be (even if in somecases the competition has a better product).

I'm not sure how they did it, but their head of marketing must be a genius.

Here's how they get away with it: lack of competit

[metamatic]

I was a happy Android user for 7+ years. But to reliably get OS updates and upgrades, and not have to put up with a botched Android UI and bloatware, that meant buying a Nexus phone and tablet. Which I did, every 2 years or so.

But then Google decided to give up on Android tablets entirely, and give up on mid-price phones. They jacked up their prices, and a Pixel 3 now starts at $799. Well, guess what, that's the same price as an iPhone XR. And Google's last Android tablet offering before they gave up was actually more expensive than an iPad. So I switched.

With computers, nobody else is even offering a good Unix-based computer. Linux isn't competitive -- I use it for work, but sound and video are still a dumpster fire and don't count on hibernation working as well as a Mac either. If I didn't need to edit 4K video and work on music, I'd probably buy a ChromeBook, and sales of ChromeBooks seem to suggest that indeed there's an underserved market there.

Basically, nobody is putting in the time and money to clean up Linux (or BSD) and offer systems where sound and video editing, hibernation, and all the other basic functionality of a Mac is right there and just works. If you want that, you either have to put up with Windows and its myriad deficiencies, or you have to buy a Mac.

I'm a little surprised that nobody's deliberately setting out to build laptops that have exactly the same hardware as a Mac and are perfectly suited to hackintosh use. Give me a laptop with a proper keyboard and hardware that all worked properly with macOS and I'd be very tempted.

It's actually not at all simple

[SuperKendall]

no one checks specs

Anyone intelligent does not check specs on mobile devices these days, because it's not raw hardware or software alone that matters - it is the combination of the two.

That is why iOS devices can get away with less RAM. Technically it's "lower spec" than some Android devices, but it ends up working better because iOS simply needs much less RAM to function well.

Same for battery, if you "check the specs" on an android device you might find a bigger battery where the entire phone has much worse real-life battery life than a similar iOS device.

Even highly technical people like myself stopped "checking the spec" some time ago for this very reason - my remain cognizant of what the specs are, but keep them in perspective within the entire function of the device.

"Checking specs" makes more sense with desktop and laptop hardware because there all of the OS choices have been heavily optimized over a long time (though even then the administration overhead matters a lot to me which is why I still will not run Windows).

It makes sense if you know math

[SuperKendall]

Even if that was accurate, why would anyone pay $1000+ for a $390 phone?

Because no-one is making a phone for $390 and selling it at $390.

Also because if I wanted to build an equivalent phone myself it would probably cost around $10 million+, and work like crap (see: so many lower tier Android handset makers).

Idiotic

Only if you hate nice things, and are super-bad at math to figure out your average cost per day...

The iPhone X last year is by far my favorite phone I have ever owned. Over many years some upgrades were just kind of slight advances, but all of the things in the iPhone X made it feel like a real step forward again. I like it so much will probably not even upgrade next year either, making for a good three year run on a phone. At that point the difference between a $1k phone and a $390 phone is nothing, with better economics of enjoyment than just about anything on this planet.