I had theory long time ago that booking hotel or airlines tickets from mac used to be more expensive than windows. Many of my friend also experienced as well. Its just theory so don't know if others had similar experience.
It's still true. Recently looked at hotels and airline tickets on my droid while a friend checked the same with their iPhone and the prices they saw were 15-20% higher for the same rooms/seats/etc.
This was also true after we logged into loyalty accounts (the discounted loyalty price on iPhone was still higher than the general public price on Android).
> I had theory long time ago that booking hotel or airlines tickets from mac used to be more expensive than windows.
I currently work remotely for a company based in California and they issue MacBooks by default to employees. We can request Windows devices but our IT department prefers to have as many people on Macs as possible for admin efficiency reasons.
We hire remote workers from all around the world and so this Mac-first policy has raised quite a bit of discussion about what the majority of our workforce is accustomed to and has been trained on. It has come up time and time again that Macs are really popular in California but outside of that state Windows still dominates by a large margin.
Now, not all parts of California are affluent of course. And like every state the demographics are all over the place in terms of income. I bring this anecdote up because I wonder if both the Bay Area discrimination discussed in the article and your hypothesis about Macs stems from California stereotypes. Outside of the state, even though wildly inaccurate and unfair for a great many Californians, a lot of people tend to think of California as if everyone in the state is extremely privileged.
At least back last I saw stats on this (maybe 2017?) iOS users were not only a ton more likely to be willing (/able) to pay for software, goods, and services, but also used their devices a ton more.
One might think they spent more time in apps, and more time total, but perhaps Android users would spend more time on the Web—but no, iOS users also spent markedly more time in their browser than Android users. They used everything on the device more, period.
Who knows why. SES-related stuff—maybe more free time? Their devices just being way more pleasant to use (this was a leading hypothesis among my fellow mobile devs who spent lots of time in both operating systems)? Hard to say.
Trying to distinguish between what I consider good and bad discriminatory pricing, I think a useful litmus-test is whether it is being done secretly or has secret criteria.