This has been true for years though; I'm curious as to why I hear it more often now. You've always been able to get more bang for your buck with a Windows machine, but that didn't stop MacBooks from selling.
Actually, Apple has been selling price competitive or even cheap machines compared to other offerings with similar performance for years. From 2007-2015 Apple consistently had the best prices for pro laptops and desktop machines among offerings with comparable build quality.
The $300 price bump for equivalent machines in 2016 and disappointing spec upgrades in 2015 and 2016 are a new deviation.
The price performance advantage of Windows machines is returning from a very long hiatus. And for Mac users it's unwelcome.
Tim Cook's Apple, of course, is all about high margins and raising average selling price. They're eating the seed corn to squeeze out more short term profits. We'll see how long it lasts.
But all of those were built and designed while Steve was leading Apple. They're like little amazing tech gifts from beyond the grave. It just takes a while to get to mass market.
There has been nothing amazing that started while Tim Cook has been running the place except raising margins by making base products less useful. Keeping the crippling 16GB limit on base iPhones for three extra years while camera images grew and grew was a bold move to drive up average selling price at the expense of customer happiness.
And he's very good at it. But it's a strategy that literally has a limited shelf life. First you get an exodus of early adopters and creative users, and eventually you get a catastrophic product failure that does a lot of damage to the brand.
Apple isn't there yet, but I'll be surprised if that failure hasn't happened by 2020.
Of course there may be One More Thing in the R&D labs to save the day. But Cook has a poor record with original R&D, so it's optimistic to assume that's going to be happen.
I'd love to be wrong about that, but the smoke signals suggest otherwise.
WWDC this year will be a turning point. The theme is the liberal arts and we'll see whether that means a return to pro hardware, or just some hand-wavey presentation rhetoric.
And a lot of the very successful products were panned when they came out, including OS X, the iPod, the MacBook Air, etc.
Most of those only took off after a few iterations and changes. The iPod only took off after it went USB for Windows. The iPhone only took off after it got 3G and the App Store. The MacBook Air only took off after a redesign and big price drop.