Has any huge, ultra-successful, ultra-profitable company ever “priced themselves out of the market”? Not for a single product launch or anything, but in a sustained way that seriously damaged the business long-term?

Yes. Apple in the 1990s.

That is why what they ought to know better now. Mind you, they probably do! I think they just worry about the next few quarters. As for the long-term, little personal incentive because "let the next guy or gal deal with that after I've moved on"

Yeah, that’s not what happened to Apple in the 90s. At all.

Maybe your memory is playing tricks on you?

It's why I switched to a PC in the 1990s. And everyone I knew. And everyone I met, read or heard about.

What was the point buying a Mac, when you could buy a faster, more compatible PC running Windows 95, which was pretty Mac-like, for half the price?

But the Mac was NEVER the majority/success the iPhone is today (at least in the US). It was always way behind. And price was a big part of the problem. Performance wasn’t until much later.

Not the Mac, but the Apple II was. When the PC industry began, Apple was king for a few years. Then Commodore overtook them in the home market, and IBM in the workplace.

I'm not sure what you mean about performance? When I switched, I had the impression PCs were outperforming Macs by a long shot. That must have been within a couple years of the Win95 release. I should probably hedge a bit there because my memory might be off. It was a long time ago.

The Apple 2, yes. It wasn’t the cheapest but it was certainly the big player in the US.

Performance: Macs were quite competitive, or even better than PCs for quite a while. It was only later as the Intel juggernaut kept going that Apple started to get steamrolled and had to switch off 68k. They regained the crown for a little while, but even the G3/4/5 were quickly overtaken by Intel.

I can't remember much about specs. Actually I can't even remember if I knew enough back then to interpret specs! Maybe i just thought PCs felt faster or something :)