
The monitor specs, in this case, are irrelevant.

Newegg has a list of monitors offering height, swivel, tilt, and pivot hinges starting at $80 (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window), that's another $600. The price of non-AppleCare repairs has been going up in nearly every product category for years (Opens in a new window).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 (Opens in a new window). Want to connect your iPhone directly to a USB-C port? That's extra (Opens in a new window). If you want to use the fast charging that your modern iPhone supports, that's an extra purchase (Opens in a new window).


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. As a reminder, Apple used to run ads like this: In 2019, you aren't being pecked to death by ducks, so much as fleeced like a sheep. This latest ridiculous price decision is further evidence of a trend that kicked into high gear (Opens in a new window) back in 2016.
