why apple laptops are so expensive?
A lot of people wonder why the price of an Apple laptop is higher than a PC computer. There’s an interesting secret to this phenomenon that few people know,
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because they never think to ask: PCs almost always cost much less than Macs do. In other words, it’s not the computers themselves that are expensive—it’s the software that comes with them and makes them useful enough for you to buy in the first place.
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And this software costs money, even though you don’t have to fork over a dime when buying a PC. In fact,
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Microsoft and other companies that make PC software actually pay Apple to use their computers as a sort of billboard. Of course, this isn’t technically a business expense;
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you the consumer are paying for it. But you aren’t paying directly, which is why this article is not just about the unfair business practices of Apple but also of PC software makers and PC manufacturers.
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To understand how this happens, you need to know a little bit about computer history and some of the people responsible for making our current technology what it is today.
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First, remember that all computers are made to do two things: input/output (I/O) and process data (PD). I/O refers to how the computer receives and sends information to and from devices, people and the Internet.
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PD refers to how the computer processes information for use internally or for sending out. These two functions exist within every computer, in both PCs and Macs.
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However, Apple computers are currently much better at I/O than they are at PD; PCs are better at PD than they are at I/O.
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Most people would say that Apple is more user-friendly than PC software (though I’m not going to get into that argument here). The problems lies with PD.
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The problem with PD is that it’s more expensive to make a computer extremely good at it than it is to make it good at I/O. This means that while PCs have been getting better at processing data, they haven’t been improving nearly as much on the input side of things.
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A $500 Macintosh is way faster and more efficient at I/O than a $300 Windows machine, even though the Mac was never intended to be anything more than an I/O device and the PC was meant to be both an I/O and a PD device.
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To understand why this is, you’ll need to know a little bit about the history of Apple and the history of Microsoft.
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The two most important points in Apple’s history are (1) when it came out with its original Mac OS and (2) when it started creating its own computers. Both were done by Steve Jobs,
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who had previously created a company called NeXT that made Mac-like PD software. Jobs sold NeXT to Apple after he was ousted from the company because he wanted to focus on PD and not I/O.
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This change in focus caused the price of Apple computers to go up because of the expensive PD software that was used in them.
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