It’s received wisdom among a certain set of people that even the best Apple products are criminally overpriced. According to this way of thinking, Apple charges wildly inflated prices for its devices and only suckers pay full whack for anything it sells.
But like much of the world’s received wisdom, this idea isn’t always correct. In fact, I would argue that it’s more wrong than right when it comes to Apple.
Sure, I’m not arguing that Apple products are not pricey — because they absolutely are — and maybe in some cases they are overpriced (Apple’s prices for Mac memory and storage come to mind). But there’s an important difference between expensive and overpriced. Apple devices are often the former, but are they overpriced? That’s a different argument entirely.
The $14,000 bargain
To take an example, look at the iPhone. It’s one of the best smartphones in the world and consistently sells in incredible numbers. If it was overpriced, would millions of users be duped into buying it year after year? Of course not, people aren’t stupid and they can tell a dud from a mile off (just look at the Humane AI Pin).
The recent Mac Studio also demonstrates this well. Configure this device all the way up to the maximum and you can expect to pay the princely sum of $14,099. And no, it’s not even gold plated.
That sounds like an unbelievable amount of money, but consider what you get:
- An M3 Ultra chip with some of the fastest CPU cores on the market
- 512GB of unified memory that, thanks to its unified architecture, performs better than your average RAM
- An enormous 16TB of extremely fast SSD storage
- A tiny form factor
- Superb build quality that will last you years
Try outfitting a Windows system with that kind of power and you’ll be paying far more. Spec up something similar from Dell, for example, and you can easily pay double Apple’s asking price for less performance in a larger, uglier case. At the high end, Apple is surprisingly affordable.
Priced to perform
So why does Apple have a reputation for overcharging? Well, part of it is probably justified, as the memory and storage upgrades I alluded to can attest. But that doesn’t explain the situation entirely — clearly, the Mac Studio is not overpriced, despite costing an arm and a leg.
The way I see it, part of the issue centers on the fact that Apple is a company that unashamedly makes premium devices. As our Mac Studio reviewer said, the machine “exhibit[s] that exquisite Apple manufacturing prowess that the company applies to all its products.” Even its lower-priced products like the iPhone 16e proudly convey their luxury. That’s hard to quantify on paper and might appear overpriced to someone who doesn’t value that sort of aesthetic.
The other aspect is that Apple mainly focuses on consumer products. Accordingly, the majority of its customers are consumers, not demanding professionals. So when a consumer sees something like the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro, they can’t understand how $14,000 could possibly represent value for money.
And compared to their needs, where a $999 MacBook Air or a $1,599 MacBook Pro might easily do the job, $14,000 absolutely is an unreasonable amount to pay.
But these people are not the intended market of these monstrous computers. For people who want to render high-resolution videos in double-quick time, or those who crunch outrageously powerful machine learning algorithms all day long, $14,000 is a fair price to pay. The context matters.
So, does that mean you should buy a Mac Studio? Not unless you have tremendously demanding workloads and it meets your specific needs. It is, of course, extremely expensive, and both the outlay and the power will go to waste if you could reasonably get by on something more affordable.
But not everyone will feel that way, and for those that need power — or just want a premium device the exudes luxury — the cost is well worth it. And if that eye-wateringly expensive $14,000 Mac Studio proves anything, it’s that maybe $14,000 isn’t so much to pay for a pro-level computer after all.
