I’ve been an Apple user long enough to be confronted with the argument of Apple’s hardware being too expensive. In the era when PCs entered the home, people gave precedence to the ownership of a computer over the experience of using a computer. The argument often came down to price and affordability.
Apple’s reputation for charging a premium for their products has an almost four-decades-long history. Over the past few years however, this reputation seems to add the notion of Apple customers being nickeled-and-dimed. [1]
Traditionally Apple’s prices for storage capacity and memory were hardly ever a great value. And up until these components became a non-exchangeable part of the device, you could get them cheaper from other vendors and even upgrade over time – at least so with most Macs. Sadly, this option has mostly disappeared. With the introduction of thunderbolt and later USB-C only ports, Apple’s laptops have suffered the out-of-the-box versatility that made them so great. [2]
Dongles among best selling Apple products at BestBuy [3]
You need ethernet? Buy a dongle! You need USB-A? Buy a dongle! You need an HDMI port? Buy a dongle! You need more than one port? Buy a multi-port dongle!
But it doesn’t end with hardware. The pitiful 5GB of storage that comes with iCloud, results in a lacking user experience on modern iOS devices, with more and more iOS services pushing to iCloud. Again, Apple’s solution is simple – pay up and get more storage. And they prompt you in not so subtle ways to do so.
Then there is the situation with the AppStore, where the price of admission for developers is 30% of all sales. The outcry for flexibility was long and loud from the community. It wasn’t until eight years after the introduction of the AppStore that Apple budged. Now Developers would make an extra 15% from their subscription offerings — after the first year.
Revenue from Apple’s Services, which includes iCloud and AppStore is a growing multi-billion dollar business by itself. [4]
All that is to say, to me, it’s how today’s Apple products are designed and shipped. I believe some of them are incomplete and make for a lacking customer experience. Taking up some of Apple’s offerings should add value to the product not complete it.
In an era when Microsoft owned 95% of the computing market and Apple was the barely surviving underdog, we were happy to shell over extra cash for the best computing experience. Though with Apple’s rise to a trillion-dollar company, the fact of having to pay extra here and there to have an adequate user experience feels irritating.