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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

To understand scale: Apple has given $43 Billion to investors since July 2012. Twitter's market cap is $32 Billion. Apple's net profit of $13b over the last 3 months was more than the company made from its founding in 1977 'til the iPhone launched in 2007.

Last night my wife and I were organizing our room, and ended up putting our computers together, and we found three MacBooks (one is really old), two iPads and two iPhones - about $3500 worth of product. The phones are heavily subsidized by our phone bill, the computers are simply "must-haves," and the iPads are our most expensive ($350 ea.) toys. We're one year out of school and make $40,000/year.

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'subsidized'

Not trying to one-up you, but I have at least a dozen Apple products lying around the house. I've been using them most of my life, so some go a-ways back.

Some are for nostalgia, like an SE, a Portable, a 12" PowerBook and my well-worn first-gen iPhone. My G4 tower was still getting regular use as a file server until pretty recently. Now that we just upgraded to Airs, I have a couple MacBook Pros waiting around for something creative, too. I won't drag on, but I definitely have a hard time letting some of these things go.

I think the poster's point was that he spends a lot of money on apple products, relative to his income. To understand apple's success, one should look at how much money ordinary people with ordinary jobs spend disproportionate money on products they wouldn't otherwise.

There's a graph somewhere of yearly sales figures of various cars vs the cost of those cars. There's a general exponential decline from say the toyota camry, which costs reasonably and sells a lot, to a Bentley, which is the opposite. But there's an irregular data point with the BMW 3-series, because many, many people stretch to afford it. It sells disproportionately well for that reason.

I'm not assigning judgment on how anyone spends their money, just pointing out that there are human reasons for business success and failure.

I make a little more that the parent, but still don't think of Apple products as affordable. It's almost always a stretch for me to purchase them, but I wouldn't be happy with many of the other options.

In the case of my recent upgrade, I justified it as an investment in my future. I don't consider the money I spent on it to be a purchase that I would be comfortable making frequently.

Wether you are a college student of an independent developer, the technology you use affects your success. Apple has a reputation in both industries as being above-average, further demonstrated by the loyalty many users have.

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