Does Apple charge a premium? Of course. Do Apple products also tend to have better construction, greater reliability, consistent repair support, and hold their resale value better? Yes.
The idea that people are buying Apple because of the Apple premium simply doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. It's demonstrably not a Verblen good.
Now that is a trope when you're talking about Apple. They may use more premium materials that and have a degree of improved construction leveraging those materials - but at the end of the day there are countless numbers of failure prone designs that Apple continued to ship for years even after knowing they existed.
I guess I don't follow the fact that the "Apple Premium" (whether real or otherwise) isn't a factor in a buyer decision. Are you saying Apple is a great lock-in system and that's why people continue to buy from them?
I suspect they're saying that for a lot of us, Apple provides enough value compared to the competition that we buy them despite the premium prices (and, on iOS, the lock-in).
It's very hard to explain to people who haven't dug into macOS that it's a great system for power users, for example, especially because it's not very customizable in terms of aesthetics, and there are always things you can point to about its out-of-the-box experience that seem "worse" than competitors (e.g., window management). And there's no one thing I can really point to and say "that, that's why I stay here"; it's more a collection of little things. The service menu. The customizable global keyboard shortcuts. Automator, AppleScript (in spite of itself), now the Shortcuts app.
And, sure, they tend to push their hardware in some ways, not always wisely. Nobody asked for the world's thinnest, most fragile keyboards, nor did we want them to spend five or six years fiddling with it and going "We think we have it now!" (Narrator: they did not.) But I really do like how solid my M1 MacBook Air feels. I really appreciate having a 2880x1800 resolution display with the P3 color gamut. It's a good machine. Even if I could run macOS well on other hardware, I'd still probably prefer running it on this hardware.
Anyway, this is very off topic. That ChatGPT Pro is pretty damn expensive, isn't it? This little conversation branch started as a comparison between it and the "Apple tax", but even as someone who mildly grudgingly pays the Apple tax every few years, the ChatGPT Pro tax is right off the table.
They only have to be consistently better than the competition, and they are, by far. I always look for reviews before buying anything, and even then I've been nothing but disappointed by the likes of Razer, LG, Samsung, etc.
The lack of repairability is easily Apple's worst quality. They do everything in their power to prevent you from repairing devices by yourself or via 3rd party shops. When you take it to them to repair, they often will charge you more than the cost of a new device.
People buy apple devices for a variety of reasons; some people believe in a false heuristic that Apple devices are good for software engineering. Others are simply teenagers who don't want to be the poor kid in school with an Android. Conspicuous consumption is a large part of Apple's appeal.
Here in Brazil Apple is very much all about showing off how rich you are. Especially since we have some of the most expensive Apple products in the world.
Maybe not as true in the US, but reading about the green bubble debacle, it's also a lot about status.
Does Apple charge a premium? Of course. Do Apple products also tend to have better construction, greater reliability, consistent repair support, and hold their resale value better? Yes.
The idea that people are buying Apple because of the Apple premium simply doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. It's demonstrably not a Verblen good.