In the car analogy that would be more like all the trim levels and hardware addons being hugely overpriced... but that's definitely not a new thing in the car world.

The wheels and stand on the mac pro stuff is weird but they are kind of in line with the pricing of the competing products. If you look at the cases for the iphone, all of the cases they sell in the Apple Store are pretty expensive, but all of them are quite good. If you go to a 3rd party store and look for things of the same quality, they cost the same. Good cases just cost a bit of money.

Now the lightning adapters I agree on. Those were absurd. But now they have USB-C on most of their products and they have dropped the cost of adapters quite a lot. The USB-C to AUX adapter contains a full DAC which is tested to be one of the best you can get, and it costs $9.

People are paying for the branding, not the item. It's the same reason a rolex is substantially more expensive than a watch that tells time just as well - people spend money on more expensive versions of things that provide no additional practical benefit explicitly to demonstrate that they have money to burn. If you don't care about the brand, you can still buy third party options and they work just fine at a fraction of the cost. Indeed if you had to pay for the expensive apple version, it wouldn't mean anything that you spent so much, and then it would ironically be significantly less valuable.

Seems a stretch to readily assume Apple would mimic digital subscriptions with their high priced accessories strategy where they presumably don’t even have dominance, and don’t even have stuff like a popular or well liked monitor any more vs 2009’s Thunderbolt. If this was true. It would also mean there is little press and casual discussion on how much more expensive Apple’s equivalent digital services are.

Add on people across the spectrum may buy expensive-ish or expensive hardware, but cheap out on [any] digital purchases or subscriptions.

All of this makes the reason to assume appear to be because of bias and disliking of the brand.

>The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this.

That's not it at all. At least not for me.

I'm a "free as in freedom" rather than "free as in beer" kinda guy.

And that's why I won't touch Apple gear. Heck, I don't even like beer.

The only things Apple charges subscriptions on are actual content services or server usage charges which are inline with literally every other business. Many people, even on HN it seems, have a completely distorted idea on what the products Apple sells actually are.

> but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.

How?

Licensing music requires ongoing payments from Apple to music owners.

iCloud requires Apple to maintain data centers and bandwidth.

TV+ requires ongoing investment into creation of new video productions.

News+ is similar to music, Apple has ongoing costs to pay the owner of the journalism.

Games also gets new games all the time, so presumably there are ongoing expenses there also.

And fitness+ might be one where there is less need for ongoing expenses, but they do seem to be adding content regularly.

This doesn’t make sense. Their digital services require ongoing costs that are obvious to even non technical people. IE even my non technical mom would know TV and music streaming costs regular money. Most people know storage space costs money because of the cloud sync apps.

I don’t see how people can compare this to being turned upside down like you say unless they are claiming that for every major tech company. At which point Apple has little to do with it. Otherwise I don’t see how that thinking can be for any reason other than strong to extreme bias against Apple specifically.

I don’t recall being upsold applecare+ before. Maybe it’s a pretty small part of the online checkout process and I haven’t noticed it? I’m sure it happens. A family member and a friend have asked about it because they were being unsold. Still, this isn’t like some of the infamous upselling industries and niches.

iCloud is marketed like a loss leader.

Don't forget disallowing local backups for no reason other than moneygrubbing.

$3/month for 200Gb is reasonable in your opinion, but people who don't buy Apple can buy a 2T drive for $50.