People get upset because they don't have a "cheap" product offering.
With Dell there's the Inspirons
With HP there's the Pavillion
With Lenovo there's Ideapads and Yoga's and stuff.
With Apple, their cheapest laptop is comparable to a business laptop (Elitebook, Latitude), and their most expensive laptops are comparable to the "creator" laptops like Dell XPS or HP ZBook -- except the Apple computers have better build quality than those.
But people only look at the spec sheet and claim it's overpriced.
Apple are definitely guilty of gouging the price of upgrades, but that's just business sense, if you need the update then you have to trade how much it's worth to you- it's just that other manufacturers do not do that.
Apple's whole trick to gaining performance is to trade away the ability to upgrade RAM because having the RAM/GPU/CPU all exist within the same chip improves the physical locality which decreases latency.
This is ultimately the same trick that consoles use in their APUs. At minimum it's a great way to bring power down and enable HSA/Fusion/M1 style unified-memory shenanigans, and in the long term it's going to be the only way forward with rising dGPU costs in the low-end market.
Personally, I don't care about them having a cheap offering. I hate them because the entire way they work is to lock you into their ecosystem. It's like Microsoft used to be, only much worse because at least back in the bad-ol' days of the 2000s, MS didn't sell hardware, and didn't have an "app store" either.
With Dell, by contrast, I can buy an Inspiron or a Latitude or a workstation, then wipe out the pre-loaded Windows junk and install the Linux distro of my choice, and it works fine. Then if I don't like the included SSD size, I can easily pop it open and install a bigger Samsung one that I bought on Amazon. And having a Dell laptop doesn't pressure me in any way to own a Dell cellphone (which doesn't exist anyway), or vice versa.
The only part of Apple's ecosystem that has ever held a central place in my life are macs. Since 2013 I've used Macbook Pros as my primary development machine and arbitrary android devices for my phone. I did also buy an iPad 3 which I still have, but it's never been very useful beyond being a browsing or reading device. I don't really buy any claims of being locked in, I use macs because they're preferable, and tend to keep them for a long time. Windows is a trashheap, don't feel like bothering with Linux.
I haven't upgraded my intel macbook pro from 2019 just because the ram and ssd upgrade are irritatingly expensive, but eventually I'm sure it'll be tolerable somehow, either because my current one has become wildly too slow or because the cost comes down.
I have no reason to buy an iPhone, so I don't, what's the problem?
With Dell there's the Inspirons
With HP there's the Pavillion
With Lenovo there's Ideapads and Yoga's and stuff.
With Apple, their cheapest laptop is comparable to a business laptop (Elitebook, Latitude), and their most expensive laptops are comparable to the "creator" laptops like Dell XPS or HP ZBook -- except the Apple computers have better build quality than those.
But people only look at the spec sheet and claim it's overpriced.
Apple are definitely guilty of gouging the price of upgrades, but that's just business sense, if you need the update then you have to trade how much it's worth to you- it's just that other manufacturers do not do that.