No, Apple is at least partially successful because it’s a luxury brand. That’s not the same as more expensive=better. The Apple comparison is also dumb because even if you think they’re overpriced, they aren’t priced arbitrarily high and there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors. Compare that to wine, coffee and audio equipment that fails to be differentiated in blind tests.

> there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors

This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.

Classic “only one metric matters”, by this standard you should only choose food based on how full does it make you which I guess is how we arrived at Soylent

> iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android

The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.

> iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android

Replace «iPhone» with “Samsung Galaxy” and your argument stays true. It’s just that manufacturers created a market for phones with giant screens, 3+ cameras and CPUs that can fly you to Oort cloud.

If you want to get drunk and that's your only value you place on a drink why even choose wine to compare? You can buy bottom shelf vodka and get more ethanol for your buck than Two Buck Chuck. Hell, vodka is wastefully distilled multiple times, why not just chase bootleg moonshine producers for even less? It all gets you drunk the same so they must be equivalent products.

Pedantic point since we're on HN and I spent some time learning about this. Moonshine is also distilled, so the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of ethanol quantity for price would be water, sugar and bread yeast, maybe adding tomato paste and lemon juice, commonly known as "Birdwatchers sugar wash recipe". If labor is considered free, a still shouldn't add much to the cost as long as you use it a lot.

Vodka is often triple distilled and almost always diluted to 100 proof or less. Moonshine has no such standards.

But yeah, homemade sugar solution and wine yeast would be your most efficient per dollar.

And Brainfuck does exactly the same thing as any other programming language.

It also has a measurably faster CPU.

The meme that people buy Apple products as status symbols needs to die at some point. If you can name one single other manufacturer making products at the quality of an iPhone but at half the price then you can call them overpriced. I don't normally like to use the "if it was possible someone would have done it by now" argument but there are literally millions of Apple copycats and wannabees and they all suck. Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good and can be felt going to any big box store and picking up any laptop. If you don't care about that then of course you'll say they're overpriced because dollars aren't going to places you don't care about. It's why I love my M50x's, they're cheap ass plastic and faux leather because every dollar went into the inside.

Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.

>Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good

Apple might be qualitatively better than most, but I wouldn't call it quantitatively "insanely good". The product design often has major "bugs", like "you are holding it wrong" iPhone 4 or the macbook pro keyboards that stopped working a lot.

I myself had a screen replacement once on a mbp 2015 model because the "protective coating" peeled off... a known problem and Apple replaced it for free even tho I was a few months outside of my warranty.

And the power cable had a tendency to shed off the outer isolation layer and/or "fray", which is by no means a problem only I had given the many "how to fix" DIY youtube videos. Same thing with other cables, like the Lightning ones, I am told.

Cooling in the Intel macbook pros and airs also was a constant problem, and the engineering seems ridiculous at times[0].

That was the product design side... the manufacturing... not really what Apple does itself. The same manufacturers who work for Apple usually work for a lot of other companies as well. It might be that Apple insists on better quality (and maybe even pays a premium). But the iPhones I saw do not look like they had a lot better manufacturing quality than the phones I was using (I am not talking about better/more expensive components, that's a design decision).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCBYAP_Sgg

Don't forget the incident when just running Windows on your MacBook could damage the speakers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh-TdgfSNLs

Or more recently the 2019 MBP where plugging in the charger on the left side of the machine would cause it to thermal throttle whereas the right side was fine.

BMWs are better "driving machines" than Honda Civics. They're still a luxury car and status symbols. Things can be two things at once. Just as the Honda Civic will get you from point A to point B just fine, there's a phone less than half the price of a new iPhone 13 pro will do what smartphones need to do these days. You just look like old-fashioned and not very "with it" if you do.

Guess how well that phone sells?

Not very well. It sells so poorly that the manufacturer's announced they're going to stop making them. It's even from the same manufacturer but the paucity of its sales is what makes me believe a lot of people are iPhones for status symbols. I'm talking, of course, about the $400 iPhones SE (vs the iPhone 13 Pro which clocks in at $1,000). There are other differences too, but you will get made fun of, either to your face, or behind your back, for having a 'phone with a button'.

Just own up to the fact that you have a luxury phone.

This is such a weird view of the world, Apple products are the Honda Civics. They're literally mass-market products with 50% market share in the US. They're not some snooty artisanal soda, they're Coke, and you're over here arguing that if you drink anything other than Big K you're doing it for the status.

You are allowed to aim a little higher than rice and beans for dinner without fear of it being called gourmet. It's been a decade since anyone cared what kind of phone you have. My four year old used iPhone with a cracked screen makes me look rich AF I'm sure.

> but you will get made fun of, either to your face, or behind your back, for having a 'phone with a button'.

What? We must be living in different worlds. Being made fun of is bizarre.

There’s an iPhone SE 2 as well. I have it.

Are you a teenager? I can understand phone status mattering a lot to them, but if someone tried to make fun of me for using an iPhone SE2 I'd just laugh at them for trying to assign status to such an embarrassingly minor thing.

I think many people conflate at least 3 different terms when discussing whether iPhones are expensive:

- “Luxury good” is objective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_goods: “a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending” (luxury goods need not be expensive, either, especially if they only become useful in combination with other items that are expensive. Many people can afford to buy golf balls, but I think they still are luxury goods because golf clubs, club membership, and the ability to find time to play golf all are luxury goods)

- “Status symbol” is subjective, with groups of people deciding whether something is a status symbol. Status symbols need not even be expensive. Cultural or legal norms can prohibit the “don’t haves” from acquiring them (in Rome, not everybody was allowed to wear a toga, for example).

- “Overpriced” is subjective, with each individual deciding for themselves whether they think something is overpriced. Because of this, arguing whether an item _is_ overpriced is useless.

I see “overpriced” as 100% distinct from “has high profit margin” That’s objective, but a consequence of the value users see in a product (either as a functional item or as status symbol)

I don’t have the numbers, but chances are that iPhones are luxury goods. Whether they’re the other two depends on context. If you work at the Free Software Foundation, they may not be status symbols, for example.

I'm still not an iPhone owner, but I'm close. The presence of a do not disturb physical button on the phone, the UI...with my pixel, it's not always a simple one swipe to the flashlight button. Which is amazingly annoying compared to even older phones. I have since bought a dedicated flashlight.

I just shake my (cheapo moto) phone for a flashlight. That doesn't work on pixels?

You can be both a status symbol and an objectively superior product; they are not mutually exclusive.

A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."

The truth is clear when it costs more but is is objectively worse, yet sells anyway.

The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.

Another day on the internet where someone states their opinion as truth. Truly you have convinced me Brother I'm torching my android phone right now.

At least with those things, there's the theoretical possibility that there's a difference though.

Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?

Audiophiles aren't concerned with just the signal being reproduced faithfully - it has to happen without side effects. You're talking past each other if you don't address that.

But ultimately that means a clean digital pipeline and high quality D/A converters before it hits an actual speaker. The thing is... unless there are unnecessary conversions (making the signal less than bitperfect), there is no point for a lot of the digital side of this

What kind of side effects are you talking about?

Side effects like power consumed from the grid? Heat voided into the room? Gravitational attraction from the heavy case? Money draining from their account?

They get all of that.

Coffee is still there: The Weber HG-2 - The $1,650 Hand Grinder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL65i1XhVec

https://weberworkshops.com/products/hg-2

My wife bought me a $300 coffee grinder for Christmas. As a coffee ...enthusiast?... I'm quite fond of it. Perfectly consistent grid, very quiet electric operation, small footprint. I could argue that $300 was too much for it, but I'm willing to pay a premium for good product. $1,650 would be utterly insane.

I recently picked up the Fellow Ode for myself. I'm very happy with it so far and it's working exactly as advertised. Quiet, consistent, and very fast.

So which one was it? :)

Probably the Fellow Ode

It's the Fellow Ode, as ezarowny correctly guessed. :)

I don’t think it’s a good analogy. With the coffee grinders you can have objective physical measurements for the coffee particle size distribution after the grinding process. Sure, the taste improvement would hit diminishing returns as the grinder price increases, but it would still exist. You as a buyer have to decide for yourself at which point the price stops making sense based on your budget.

The audiophile hardware on the other hand is being sold based on the promises that defy an objective physical reality.

Grinding coffee is hard. It's very easy to get particles that are too fine, overextract, and ruin the taste. So some engineering is required to get a good result.

For these limited-run products, you're paying for the product development to a greater extent than you would for a product that sells in the millions. Software is very similar, someone could use Wordpress off the shelf, but they have a bunch of ideas for how their thing should be different, and so pay artisans $300 an hour to make their very own custom blog. The $1700 coffee grinder is the same effect at play.

At least with coffee grinders you can measure the distribution of particle sizes to see that cheaper grinders are producing something quantitatively different as output, and use blind tests to see if you care. $1650 might still be a bit much, but the way you grind coffee does have a surprising impact on how it tastes.

I’m not a coffee “enthusiast” but we have a grinder at home, and I’m definitely not getting the same coffee as I did in the office when I used their grinders.

hey, juicero at least was electric

> hey, juicero at least was electric

But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands.

Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.

It is in fact not related in any way to coffee or to Apple. Not even remotely.

Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?

Better products whose keyboards fail routinely? Oh, did they finally fix that? And, replace the bad ones? No?

Must we mention monitor stands again?

Please.