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> Apple … get to charge twice as much money for half as much performance…

Has this ever really been the case?

Maybe I should say half as much hardware. Performance is too subjective. But nobody else can charge $800 for an extra 64g of ram. My point is their thoughtfulness about their ecosystem is what allows them to de-commodify their hardware. There’s a price for RAM, and a price for RAM in an Apple computer.

I don't know the current status, but iOS's design meant apps at least used to be _far_ more efficient than the equivalent Android, and thus Apple could ship lower end hardware to deliver the same or better performance to the end user. The was a measurable fact, thus objective.

The same is still somewhat true for macOS where for the average web browsing user, macOS + Safari needs less memory than you would need on Windows. This is also a fact, but it doesn't help power users.

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