I don't understand why non-apple customers feel that apple is this way. I have a Mac and an iphone and haven't paid Apple a penny since the purchase of the devices.
The seriously overpriced accessories they sell is probably part of the reasons non-apple customers tend to assume this. Like they have a few accessories that cost about 10x more than pretty good quality third party alternatives, and often more than double what it costs for literally better build quality third party alternatives.
And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly justify it (pencil, or airpods), but things like cases, wheels, stands, dongles, etc.
Apple accessories very much are trying to nickel and dime people (on top of hardware that is already quite expensive), so it is unsurprising that people would (mistakenly) assume that Apple would try to do the same with digital subscriptions.
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.
Yeah, I will definitely admit that I was guilty of this right up until I bought a Macbook Air in 2014. I had just assumed that Apple was a nickel-and-diming corporation, and just worked to extract cash from its customers.
But I really didn't experience that at all. Outside of Apple Music and Apple Arcade (both of which are optional and neither of which I use/pay for) what exactly are the ongoing costs for most Apple hardware? Yes you have to buy some of the software, but that's true of basically every operating system; my 2014 Macbook still gets free updates as of about 8 months ago (I haven't checked since then since I gave it to my sister in law).
In fact I actually have found that Apple-centric apps seem to give me more options in which to pay for them outright instead of ongoing costs. Most of the the Omnigroup's software has a "just buy it once and you're done" feature, unlike something like, for example Microsoft Office.
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.
Yeah, I can't really blame them for charging a fee for Apple Music or Apple Arcade. Presumably they have to pay a recurring fee to the record labels for the rights to the songs or to the game publishers for the rights to the games, even if we pretended that the server costs were free (which of course they are not) and since they are, you know, a business and not a charity, of course they have to charge a subscription fee for it, just like Spotify (ad free), Youtube Music, Deezer, etc.
I agree it's possible, but their services offerings are all paid, and there are enough of them now that a discount bundle exists[1]. And then there's the App Store / iTunes / iTunes Match. Even checking out to buy hardware tries to upsell you AppleCare+ service.
There are many reasons it's done this way, but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.
I'm not saying there aren't costs associated with building or running these services that need to be paid for. But owning the OS and pushing subs in the default apps is just as annoying when Apple does it as when Youtube does.
I had never noticed the upselling of Arcade or Fitness before. I opened the apps up now and see there are tabs for them. I’ve opened the fitness and app stores up for ages. Never noticed before. I barely notice the TV+ stuff in the TV app. Can’t comment on the other two services. Still, yes, this is lame to do.
However if this is an extension of the original argument for why it makes sense to assume Apple is Nickle and diming over priced digital services. It doesn’t fit.
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.
It could be argued that the icloud etc costs were included as part of the purchase price. In which case the cost was estimated over the useful life of the product and then factored into the up-front price. That or the icloud service cost is covered another way as a form of marketing. Customer retention etc.
iCloud's free storage tier still being stuck at 5 GB as the base phone storage has grown to 128 GB is the main thing I'd criticize. You realistically can't use iCloud for photo storage or backups with that plan. I bet most people can blow through that just with Messages history if they have anyone sending them videos.
I think the upgrade prices are reasonable, $1/month for 50GB and $3/month for 200GB, but I can see characterizing that as nickel and diming. They should have bumped up the 5 GB base plan years ago.
When did Apple start disallowing local backups? I'll admit I haven't tried recently -- there's no data worth backing up on my iPhone anyway -- but it definitely worked just fine a few years ago. Apple's "Back up iPhone" support page[1] agrees with me.
Local backups still work fine, you just do it in Finder now instead of iTunes. Not sure what the situation is for Windows users.
As far as comparing prices, yes, a bare hard drive is cheaper but I'm paying for that storage with services and backups attached to it. A hard drive won't automatically sync photos between my phone and my computer, and I'm more likely to have that hard drive fail than I am to lose iCloud.
Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle. Yeah you can buy way more acceleration for less money, but good luck moving your furniture.
And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly justify it (pencil, or airpods), but things like cases, wheels, stands, dongles, etc.
Apple accessories very much are trying to nickel and dime people (on top of hardware that is already quite expensive), so it is unsurprising that people would (mistakenly) assume that Apple would try to do the same with digital subscriptions.