I suspect they're saying that for a lot of us, Apple provides enough value compared to the competition that we buy them despite the premium prices (and, on iOS, the lock-in).
It's very hard to explain to people who haven't dug into macOS that it's a great system for power users, for example, especially because it's not very customizable in terms of aesthetics, and there are always things you can point to about its out-of-the-box experience that seem "worse" than competitors (e.g., window management). And there's no one thing I can really point to and say "that, that's why I stay here"; it's more a collection of little things. The service menu. The customizable global keyboard shortcuts. Automator, AppleScript (in spite of itself), now the Shortcuts app.
And, sure, they tend to push their hardware in some ways, not always wisely. Nobody asked for the world's thinnest, most fragile keyboards, nor did we want them to spend five or six years fiddling with it and going "We think we have it now!" (Narrator: they did not.) But I really do like how solid my M1 MacBook Air feels. I really appreciate having a 2880x1800 resolution display with the P3 color gamut. It's a good machine. Even if I could run macOS well on other hardware, I'd still probably prefer running it on this hardware.
Anyway, this is very off topic. That ChatGPT Pro is pretty damn expensive, isn't it? This little conversation branch started as a comparison between it and the "Apple tax", but even as someone who mildly grudgingly pays the Apple tax every few years, the ChatGPT Pro tax is right off the table.
It's very hard to explain to people who haven't dug into macOS that it's a great system for power users, for example, especially because it's not very customizable in terms of aesthetics, and there are always things you can point to about its out-of-the-box experience that seem "worse" than competitors (e.g., window management). And there's no one thing I can really point to and say "that, that's why I stay here"; it's more a collection of little things. The service menu. The customizable global keyboard shortcuts. Automator, AppleScript (in spite of itself), now the Shortcuts app.
And, sure, they tend to push their hardware in some ways, not always wisely. Nobody asked for the world's thinnest, most fragile keyboards, nor did we want them to spend five or six years fiddling with it and going "We think we have it now!" (Narrator: they did not.) But I really do like how solid my M1 MacBook Air feels. I really appreciate having a 2880x1800 resolution display with the P3 color gamut. It's a good machine. Even if I could run macOS well on other hardware, I'd still probably prefer running it on this hardware.
Anyway, this is very off topic. That ChatGPT Pro is pretty damn expensive, isn't it? This little conversation branch started as a comparison between it and the "Apple tax", but even as someone who mildly grudgingly pays the Apple tax every few years, the ChatGPT Pro tax is right off the table.