> What gives people the perception of apple being expensive is that other OEMs play tricks to boost numbers on a spec sheet that the common person checks while cheeping out massively on parts that don’t show on the spec sheet.

This is very real. I noticed that the Lenovo T14s has a noticeably better trackpad than the Lenovo T14, but you can't tell unless you try it out on both Notebooks as both are listed as "Mylar® surface multi-touch touchpad" on the spec sheet.

> What gives people the perception of apple being expensive is that other OEMs play tricks to boost numbers on a spec sheet that the common person checks while cheeping out massively on parts that don’t show on the spec sheet.

Yep! Like with dell: non-standard power supply size, non-standard motherboard size. And with most of the companies: a motherboard that uses whatever the cheapest USB, sound, SATA chipsets were in the bin that week.

The boards are designed and reworked constantly by the factories...as opposed to Apple who pour enormous engineering effort into refining, testing, etc each revision.

This is very true!

At the same time, this can be important or not.

When I do my pc builds I pick the cheapest case as well, and I'm fine with it. Similarly I took non-Apple laptops all my life (up to 5 years ago, when I started coasting on employers' hardware) without many problems. I just couldn't justify spending 3k to have a laptop which performs as well as one for 1k, just for the better quality of the materials.

It's really the cost of capability and addons, I'm not sure about that MSI model but you're able to get a ton of storage and a good gpu for under what apple charges

if you want one or two tb of storage and decent ram you're looking at $3,000+ after taxes

I think this still ties in to the point. People laugh at the apple user mentality of “I just know it’s going to work if I buy Apple”. But then you have windows OEMs where you have to do careful research because the product line is full of scams and traps.

As a user of a 15" 2018 MBP, Apple has had their fair share of scams and traps. They had no business stuffing the chips they did in that chassis. Especially the i9s. The cooling is woefully inadequate even for my base model i7 and I have no doubt that a $1000 gaming laptop with its "cheep" build with the same CPU would have better sustained performance.

Apple has also repeatedly sold several year old computers at brand new prices, in particular the 13" 2012 MBP that was only discontinued mid-2016, the 2015 MBA that they "updated" in 2017 and sold for another few years, the 2014 mini, the 2013 Mac Pro. What's worse is most of these were computers at the bottom of their price range. I had to steer so many people away from the attractive seeming base model MBP and convince them that yes, it worth spending $200 extra to get a machine that's 3 years newer. What other OEM literally sells several year old machines for new prices?

EDIT: Just remembered they still sell the 2018 i5 Mac Mini for the same price.

EDIT 2: Oh yeah and I just remembered they'd hide what generation Intel CPU you were getting and just say Dual Core 2.5Ghz i5.

that's true for all products these days, including apples