Whaaaaat? 15 years ago takes you all the way back to the PPC to Intel transition, Apple has released tons and tons of price competitive products in that timefra

Whaaaaat? 15 years ago takes you all the way back to the PPC to Intel transition, Apple has released tons and tons of price competitive products in that timeframe. Not cheapest, but competitive. The first Intel Macbook was easily the best and least frustrating Windows Vista computer you could buy at the time. Plus they came with OSX and a slew of great software out of the box that at the time you'd have to pay hundreds of dollars extra for on a PC. The Macbook Air (even the crappy first revision) was without competition for its time and stayed that way into the early 2010s while everyone else was pushing Netbooks. The first Retina MBP in 2012 had almost no competition at release with a comparable screen at the same price point. The first 5K iMac was literally a free computer bundled with the 5k display panel. The current Mac Pro and the pre-trashcan Mac Pro are/were price-to-performance comparable to other workstation class hardware packages from Dell and HP (they offer less configurations and update less frequently however). The iPhone SE models are competitive. The base model iPad typically stands without competition, you either get frustrating garbage on the low end or lower value Galaxy Tabs or ChromeOS or low end Surface tablets (or worse, an ARM based Surface tablet) on the higher end. The Apple Pencil's price to performance ratio drove down the cost of that entire product segment by popularizing it. Previous $100 stylus options were much worse. AirPods at their time of release were some of the cheapest completely wireless headphones available (most had behind-the-head wires still). The new M1 model computers are also now very competitive for the performance they're showing. Apple basically never competes in a race to the bottom and they rarely offer anything in the lowest tier of product pricing categories and they absolutely don't cater to everyone (especially PC gamers) but for the mid to high end they wouldn't exist if they weren't competitive.