alt Hacker NewsI am an old school Apple user (first personal machine a second-hand Pismo PowerBook) and I find it dumbfounding how most of their customers justify any of their predatory behavior in ways that boggles the mind.
It really is cult-like behavior, there is no other way to put it. There is the famous piece of writing by Umberto Eco about Macs being catholic (https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html) and it really feels like that, their users tend to be highly religious, just not to a traditional religion.
You can use the stuff and like it, find it better in many ways but it is hard to actually accept the commercial practice with a straight face.
You make it sound like people cannot make a distinction between "I like it and I can afford it, even if the prices are high" and "commercial value extraction in a post-capitalistic hellscape is bad".
Apple isn't some magic company where if they have extreme margins the people that buy the stuff do mental gymnastics where the margins are not extreme. Of course they are. But people buying it have accepted that they can vote with their wallet, and they still vote to pay and get the product, rather than not pay and hope the signal is strong enough to lower the margins and maybe buy a product later if it is cheaper.
Most products you buy are not priced just a sliver higher than the cost of production, or even the cost of production plus R&D. They are priced at the maximum revenue possible. As long as Apple can sell NAND chips at 1000% markup, they will do it. And as long as it doesn't hurt people enough, they will keep buying it. Look at the clothing nonsense, bags, shoes etc. You can get a plastic bag made out of 10 cents of material and 2 cents of manufacturing line time but you'll have to pay $500 because it's special to some people. Or most of the plastic shoes that Nike makes, they aren't really made with $200 of plastic, that's going to be maybe $10 of material in total. There might be a much higher manufacturing cost, so maybe that's another $10. That means there's $180 going straight to Nike. But you don't see people coming to HN to complain about that, because somehow that's okay.
Where you assign some loud Apple users (let's call that the vocal minority) some cult or religious status for their behaviour, you're doing a disservice to yourself and the rest of the people that just want to stuff and will pay the price even if they don't really like it. Presumably because saving $2k in cost on a computer costs them more in UX, productivity or forced change, which they don't want, and the company extracts as much money as they can for it ($1k wheels anyone?).
Maybe the vocal minority thinks a computer can be a status symbol. But that's mostly just in their mind. The same high school mentality (and group behaviour) applies to the shoes or bags mentioned above.
Trying to make this seem like a special Apple case is pretty useless. It's capitalism at work, and you're part of it. Whether you can live with that is mostly just up to you and not much of a technology or startup discussion. We might even end up more in the area of philosophy than anything else.