Originally Posted by
Kagthul
It absolutely does. And the margin that one company has is staggering. As Jell points out above, Apple can use its dominance of the market to achieve better margins, get the parts it wants, when it wants, play OEMs against each other, you name it.
And Apple's dominance leads the way. The long-deserved utter deathh of the 3.5mm jack on phones? Apple. Ultraportable computers that dont sacrifice power (but therefore need to be glued together)? Apple (wether you like it or not, its paved the way for laptops of half the weight as before). Better screens in laptops? Apple.
Which is what they all desperately, desperately fucking want. ALL of those manufacturers want that. Thats why Samsungs phones all come with their own buggered-fucking-shitbag of a custom skin, their own AI assistant, and for a decent bit Samsung was seriously considering bagging Android in favor of Tizen for precisely that reason.
Facts not in evidence. Ive already done this a couple of times in this forum, but i can go down Apples entire line and show that if you try to buy a spec-equivalent (ACTUALLY spec-equivalent, which includes weight, battery life, screen quality, port selection/versatility (TB counts), etc) PC... you almost always pay just as much as a Mac.
And you cant even get an AIO that is nearly as powerful as the iMac or with anything anywhere near the quality of that 5K screen for even close to what Apple charges (that screen alone is ~1500$ and the base iMac is only 1799$ for the entire machine). You cant get a workstation with the features of the Mac Pro for what Apple charges (though you can get close, and do *better* than Apple on the CPU because of Epyc).
Facts not in evidence.
A MacBook Air isnt really much more expensive then other ultraportables. A Razer Blade Stealth, Razer Book 13, LG Gram, Thinkpads, etc... are all about the same price as the Air (899$) or more expensive and all but one of them is significantly less powerful than the Air at that price. (And only the Razer Book and Gram can even be configured to match the Air, at 1500$+, and those are both larger (15" models).
Before you start drooling on about how "no one uses those lolololimamoron" - yeah, yeah they do. Ultraportables are the single biggest segment in laptops. By a WIDE margin.
Can you get a 500$ Chonk-O-Plastic that is... close to an Air? Arguably, yes (though not really since it takes a 4/8 Tiger Lake i7 or 8-core Ryzen 4000 laptop chip to actually match the M1). But most people dont want to carry a plastic chonkbrick around all day. They want to work all day and never have to plug in. MBA (even the old Intel one) gives that in spades.
But hey, you do you boo. Dont let the facts get in the way of a good hate-on.