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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

> Apple is the only company I am aware of that manufacturers power supplies which are reliably completely free of perceptible inductor whine...I often have to replace non-Apple USB(-C) switching power supplies

it's a well-studied economic fact that monopolists generally sell higher quality products, and it helps them maintain their monopoly. With their market power and the fat margins they earn, there is plenty of budget to do R&D and have achieve scale benefits. Their optimum-profit product-mix and pricepoints are skewed higher. Nobody complained about IBM mainframe quality, nor Bell Telephone quality.

So, it's not testimony to Apple's prowess, it's simply a cookbook outgrowth of their product differentiation strategy.

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> Nobody complained about IBM mainframe quality

Well, that's completely ahistorical. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was due to conservatism and idiocy on the part of managers and businesspeople, not to mention... you know... IBM's monopoly power and the advantages that went along with that. During the bulk of the minicomputer and mainframe era it had little or nothing to do with the relative quality of IBM's stuff.

> it's a well-studied economic fact that monopolists generally sell higher quality products

What does this have to do with Apple, which has neither the completely captive market that AT&T did nor the overwhelming market control that IBM did?

But regardless of reason it still matters to the buyer. If Apple monopoly is giving me better products, then I am not complaining.

people who set policy need to think of all consumers, not just the rich ones such as yourself. More working class people could buy iPhones if they were not artificially high priced.

You too would benefit from a competitive iPhone market, there would have been an earlier introduction of large screens, cheaper memory options, perhaps getting choices that included repairability, replaceable batteries, microSD cards, etc.

Think of it this way: if Apple was broken into three Apples that compete with each other, the shareholders would not have lost anything that they are entitled to: they'd each still own what they owned before a share of each of the new companies instead of a share in the old. But previously monopoly prices would drop.

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