> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch
I'd argue that (the low end of) Apple products are the cheapest they've ever been - the $599 iPhone 17e is below the inflation-adjusted price of the original iPhone, and at $599 the MacBook Neo is the cheapest launch price an Apple laptop has ever listed at (not even adjusting for inflation!)
The maximum amount you can spend at the high-end has certainly gone up over time, although the basic MacBook Pro Max config costs roughly the same as it's peer from 10-15 years ago - nobody's forcing folks to shell out for the 128GB of RAM (something that didn't exist on laptops at all till very recently)
I'd argue that (the low end of) Apple products are the cheapest they've ever been - the $599 iPhone 17e is below the inflation-adjusted price of the original iPhone, and at $599 the MacBook Neo is the cheapest launch price an Apple laptop has ever listed at (not even adjusting for inflation!)
The maximum amount you can spend at the high-end has certainly gone up over time, although the basic MacBook Pro Max config costs roughly the same as it's peer from 10-15 years ago - nobody's forcing folks to shell out for the 128GB of RAM (something that didn't exist on laptops at all till very recently)