Of course, some people - even Apple fans dedicated enough to show up to WWDC in person - know a bad deal when they hear it.

No, the company won’t sell a very large number of display stands/mounts in absolute terms, but every person who ponies up for either the $200 or $1,000 option is handing Apple pure profit. But by launching two peripherals, Apple creates an illusion that you have to choose between a suddenly reasonable-seeming VESA wall mount at $200 and a $1,000 absurdity. Not when an articulating wall arm intended for 55-inch screens is $30. Here’s a VESA articulating wall mount intended for up to 39-inch LED TVs. A VESA mount isn’t a brand name, it’s a standard. And Apple wants $1,000 for a piece of metal with two hinges on it or $199 for a VESA mount. We aren’t talking about monitors, we’re talking about monitor stands. The monitor specs, in this case, are irrelevant. Newegg has a list of monitors offering height, swivel, tilt, and pivot hinges starting at $80 new. The “features” this stand offers, like the ability to turn the display into portrait mode, are literally bog standard options. Selling a product it likely buys for tens of dollars for $1,000 represents a fabulous margin uplift for the company. Now, obviously Apple isn’t going to replace its iPhone sales revenue with monitor stand revenue - but that’s not the point. But every dongle purchased also drives accessories revenue - and if it costs Apple $2 – $3 to purchase a cable it sells for $20, that means the cable you pick up alongside your iPhone or MacBook is another profit driver. Apple’s Services revenue has been growing by leaps and bounds partly as a result of these tactics. They are the result of design decisions that prioritize creating a product that is deliberately incredibly expensive to fix over creating a product that would be cheap and easy to repair.

If your MacBook Pro display breaks because Apple used display cables that are slightly too short, that’s another $600. The price of non-AppleCare repairs has been going up in nearly every product category for years.īefore Apple instituted its keyboard repair program, it was charging $600 – $700 to repair keyboards, even though it has failed to resolve its keyboard failure problem through multiple revisions of the design. Want to connect your iPhone directly to a USB-C port? That’s extra. If you want to use the fast charging that your modern iPhone supports, that’s an extra purchase. Apple still includes the same 5W iPhone adapter with its phones that it’s always shipped, even though its devices support fast charging. Today, that kind of “all-in” thinking is no longer front-and-center in the company’s product designs. In 2019, you aren’t being pecked to death by ducks, so much as fleeced like a sheep.

Apple macbook pro monitor stand