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