I also get a lot of life out of MacBooks, they have been pretty reliable for me.

My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.

You could.

You very, very, very likely will not.

They know this and act accordingly.

With like a million bucks worth of tokens? Sure.

> Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.

I think you're missing a point here.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Apple avoided when it had strong management from Jobs. Now...

Or maybe they aren't. They make great devices. I use them. I don't think of them as a luxury though.

The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.

How so? Just about any major manufacturer has hardware in the same price range.

Dell, HP, etc. all have premium products as well as their economy ones. Apple just doesn't do cheap and economy products.

When that gold plated Apple Watch came out, you could feel the discomfort. That's luxury brand territory.

Even the most expensive Apple Watch isn't in that "luxury" category anymore.