ProfessorX
Unconfirmed Member
When pressed for why they don't offer any cheaper options (whether in computers, phones, etc.), Apple's refuge is to say they aren't interested in making anything so cheap they can't make it good. That's a deliberate fallacy of excluded middle, in other words, a line of bullshit. There's such a thing as building cheap crap, and there's what Apple does, cramming every product full of unnecessarily expensive parts and shaving off millimeters of thickness even when those things have zero (or often, negative!) effect on user experience. There's no question Apple could, for instance, build a perfectly good 15" laptop at $1400 with the exact same feel as MBP and Air while retaining their usual profit margins. It'd just have to be slower than the MBP and have a lesser display (but could still have a good display, far better than that on the Air). The truth is they are simply refusing to build anything mid-priced. It's got everything to do with image and upselling customers with crap they don't need, nothing to do with quality.
Apple is a high end brand. Porsche doesn't sell an inexpensive four door Sedan. Bowers and Wilkins don't sell low end inexpensive speakers. The Apple experiment with licensing Mac Clones to third parties failed.