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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.

I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...

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Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped.

They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.

Apple definitely still has products that cross into the luxury brand category. For example the Apple Watch Hermès, which starts at $1249.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch-hermes

But luxury watches are priced like cars. In that context, a four-digit price tag is competitive, if not downright cheap.

Luxury watches are often five figures or more.. in that context $1250 is a deal.

Acura and Audi then. They're still expensive vs the competition.

> Apple has never been a luxury brand.

How do you explain this $1,000 monitor stand [1]?

Or its iPhone "carry bag" collaboration with ISSEY MIYAKE retailing at $149.95 to $229.95 aka the iPhone Pocket [2]?

1: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/wwdc-2019-craziest-revea...

2: https://www.apple.com/ng/newsroom/2025/11/introducing-iphone...

The monitor stand was always priced to avoid people buying it. I'm yet to see non-custom monitor stand at any of my workplaces, besides hyperspecific situations like a ultrawide monitor.

Andy Warhol, on Coca-Cola:

>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.

Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.

I don't think it'll dilute the brand at all. The neo still feels like a premium product. Other laptop OEMs are now starting to come out with their competitors, and they are putting 1080p crap display panels on them like they always do. A $599 laptop with a 1080p screen from Dell is going to feel like a cheap piece of junk next to a Neo.

I agree with your comment generally, but note that Dell's $699 competitor they announced this week has has a slightly larger screen than the Neo with similar resolution and brightness but better color coverage.

I haven't had the chance to touch one yet. But the reviews seem to suggest the hardware doesn't "feel" cheap in the way a lot of low priced computers can.

I can't vouch on whether it's true, but that's the brand question here in my opinion. If the hinge was crappy and it felt like it was going to break any second and the keyboard was a return to the butterfly and it was slow and so on, because they wanted to make it cheap, then yeah I think that'd hurt their brand overall.

They make the best-selling phone model in the world. Best-selling smart watch, etc. Apple is not a luxury brand.

It's not Lamborghini, but Lotus had the $40,000 Elise a while ago. I don't remember how it worked out in the end, but a lot of people were excited about them at the time.

Edit lot -> not

Same for the Porsche 914.

> I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...

Oh no, won’t someone think of the millionaires

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