Comment by yunwal
2 years ago
Apple built up a really strong brand by not doing this kind of thing for a while. They get to charge twice as much money for half as much performance because they made sure their products felt nice and intuitive to use. Now they’re willing to destroy the most valuable brand in the world to make crypto money? It makes absolutely no sense, even accounting for greed.
Also, I’m sure this kind of thing hurts their prospects in antitrust cases (like in the EU)
> Apple … get to charge twice as much money for half as much performance…
Has this ever really been the case?
Maybe I should say half as much hardware. Performance is too subjective. But nobody else can charge $800 for an extra 64g of ram. My point is their thoughtfulness about their ecosystem is what allows them to de-commodify their hardware. There’s a price for RAM, and a price for RAM in an Apple computer.
I don't know the current status, but iOS's design meant apps at least used to be _far_ more efficient than the equivalent Android, and thus Apple could ship lower end hardware to deliver the same or better performance to the end user. The was a measurable fact, thus objective.
The same is still somewhat true for macOS where for the average web browsing user, macOS + Safari needs less memory than you would need on Windows. This is also a fact, but it doesn't help power users.