Whaaaaat? 15 years ago takes you all the way back to the PPC to Intel transition, Apple has released tons and tons of price competitive products in that timeframe. Not cheapest, but competitive.
The first Intel Macbook was easily the best and least frustrating Windows Vista computer you could buy at the time. Plus they came with OSX and a slew of great software out of the box that at the time you'd have to pay hundreds of dollars extra for on a PC.
The Macbook Air (even the crappy first revision) was without competition for its time and stayed that way into the early 2010s while everyone else was pushing Netbooks.
The first Retina MBP in 2012 had almost no competition at release with a comparable screen at the same price point.
The first 5K iMac was literally a free computer bundled with the 5k display panel.
The current Mac Pro and the pre-trashcan Mac Pro are/were price-to-performance comparable to other workstation class hardware packages from Dell and HP (they offer less configurations and update less frequently however).
The iPhone SE models are competitive.
The base model iPad typically stands without competition, you either get frustrating garbage on the low end or lower value Galaxy Tabs or ChromeOS or low end Surface tablets (or worse, an ARM based Surface tablet) on the higher end.
The Apple Pencil's price to performance ratio drove down the cost of that entire product segment by popularizing it. Previous $100 stylus options were much worse.
AirPods at their time of release were some of the cheapest completely wireless headphones available (most had behind-the-head wires still).
The new M1 model computers are also now very competitive for the performance they're showing.
Apple basically never competes in a race to the bottom and they rarely offer anything in the lowest tier of product pricing categories and they absolutely don't cater to everyone (especially PC gamers) but for the mid to high end they wouldn't exist if they weren't competitive.
If you consider security updates as a measure of longevity, that’s true for basically every single iPhone. Android are a 2-year device at most if you care about security (and are not a hacker), Apple is a 5-year decice; per usable year, Apple can be much cheaper.
And if you consider resale value, Macs have always been cheaper than competitors. A comparably performing dell was always slightly cheaper, but if you sold it 2-4 years later, the Mac came out ahead. And with the M1, it seems Dell doesn’t even have a sticker price advantage - unless you specifically need Windows, Linux or a configuration Apple doesn’t sell (like 64GB ram in a laptop), Mac seems to be cheaper.
> Android are a 2-year device at most if you care about security (and are not a hacker)
Apple are definitely leading the industry here, but my Samsung S7 (released Feb 2016) got a security update last month (even though Samsung has officially said it's unsupported now).
That’s good to hear. Perhaps thi by a are changing -
But do note that S7 wasn’t much cheaper (if at all) than the comparable iPhone when it came out; and this length of support is unusual for Android.
On the other hand, my 5-year old iPhone 6S got the whole new iOS14 update, and my wife’s 6 year old iPhone 6 seems to still be getting critical security updates occasionally, even though the latest OS that supports it is iOS 12, which was replaced over a year ago.
That’s not true. My first three MBPs (I tend to sell them after 3-5 years years, it’s nice that they hold their value), I specced out equivalent non Mac laptops. For size, screen, storage, ram, CPU, and graphics they were equivalent or lower cost than a non Mac laptop. I can’t comment on the last 5 years because I haven’t done the comparison in a while. That was even accounting for the Apple tax on components like RAM that (at the time) could be upgraded after purchase. Upgrading myself or through Apple, they were still price competitive.
This is really ahistorical. Apple definitely has had a few head shakers, but the "apple tax" is largely overblown.
Sure, they are never interested in the bottom of the consumer market, but that doesn't make them overpriced for what they are; they tend to be competitive with actual competitor units.
For me, they also survived sweaty conditions better than others I'd had before ("sweat resistant" was a joke on a couple of them, did not survive a summer afternoon run in Georgia). I only replaced them because they got washed and now sound very tinny (and are long out of warranty, costs as much to replace with new as to get Apple to replace just the ear pieces).
