avatar! wrote:Sure, and Apple costs what... 2-3 times the competition's price. By the way, it's not "hate", I would say it's more like general dismay at how people are willing to throw their money away because "it's an Apple". As you already said, there are similar products that do the same thing Apple does, and arguably better, but unarguably far less expensive.
When the iPhone launched, it was like $500-$600, which was stupid. But other than Blackberry, I don't recall many other smartphones on the market. I waited and I got mine for $99 when I signed up for a plan. No issues. No idea what the iPhone 5 goes for with a plan, but the Galaxy 3 was $200 with a contract. Way too much for a phone.
5th Gen iPod cost me $300, when there really wasn't much competition. No issues. Shuffle was $50, but was worth it because it could take plenty of abuse and I later on noticed the sound quality thing. Pretty standard for flash players. Cowon players cost about the same as Apple players (X7 and iPod Classic are two of the only hard drive-based media players around and both are around the $250 range). Both brands have their share of headaches and advantages (I need to test this, but some people use the line-out dock on iPods to run to a portable amp and they say the sound is much improved. Cowon players have more tweakable sound.)
iPads are priced insanely. A lot of my friends bought Kindle Fires because of that. Me personally, iPads are too large to be really useful and my iPhone is basically just a mini-tablet anyway with the same functionality, so I fail to understand why tablets overall are a big deal (other than for reading e-books or people that have trouble with small text)
What I do hate about Apple is what they charge for accessories. The little charging "block" thingy they give away with iPhones is $30 if bought separately!
By the way, I felt the same way about Sony when they launched PS3 for $600. Without their strong brand behind them, they probably would have crashed and burned clean out of this console generation.