I often find myself debating with others on whether or not several Apple products are overpriced or not. Spoiler: I’m an Apple fan, but I’m more than open to criticising Apple where I think they deserve it, whether it be design flaws *cough*notch*cough, or dongles or a variety of other things. One thing I don’t really find myself criticising is the price, which is evidently different from a lot of people.
When I have these debates with people, I often ask them what their measuring stick for the value of the device is. More often than not they tend to describe what they do with the device and how they feel that usage doesn’t really translate into the currency value. That’s where I personally differ from a lot of people, I do tend to do a lot with my phone, the entire of last semester of school my MacBook was broken and for about 80% of the time my phone was a more than adequate replacement. The new iPhone X is supposedly even clocking benchmark scores beyond that even of a MacBook Pro.
I’d always appreciated my devices, but that semester really opened my eyes into what these devices in our pockets are really capable of. You have a device that capable of shooting almost DSLR quality photo’s, it shoots 4K videos at 60fps, a device where a Grammy nominated artist (Steve Lacy) produces his music on, you have a device that performs gaming at an incredible level, that also provides a rich ecosystem for developers and users and so much more. These aren’t separate devices, this is all one device and it fits in your pocket. I think J.J Abrams said it best:
This also isn’t just the Apple fanboy in me speaking trying to make some silly justification for the price — it is expensive. But given the computing capabilities of these devices that we can call everyday devices, I really do think we have to start looking at it in a different manner. To stop looking at it from the measuring stick of “what I would do” , to one of “what can it do” to measure what it’s worth. For example even the Note 8 I think adequately justifies its price range, which isn’t all that far of the iPhone X, and given the benchmarks, performance wise the iPhone may just blow it out of the water and that’ll very likely come in hand when we see how big augmented reality comes into our lives and what developers will be able to do with it.
