See, it's a vicious cycle, the aggressive M&A strategy leads to a need to increase sales, which leads to a larger marketing budget, which finally trickles down in to the price. Now price is actually segmented itself, in terms of up-front elasticity and "walled-garden" elasticity, which Apple can monitor independently of device sales through marketing novelty through the app store and seeing if the nibbles are elastic onto services, say like Apple+. Historically they also have segmented product (XR, Pro XR) to get more data points for the degree of price elasticity, which is probably most responsive because they're the most expensive thing on the broad market.
Apple has only done two large acquisitions in 30 years. Next for $700 Million and Beats for $3 billion.
Even Apple’s cheapest phone - the iPhone SE is over $100 more expensive than the average Android phone sold in the US.
Apple has usually sold this years model, last years model and the year before that concurrently. Sometimes when the n-1 model is too expensive to sell at a discount they introduce a new phone (ie the iPhone 5C)
It’s like bringing Sams Club soda to a picnic when people are use to Coke and Pepsi