In a way it’s almost as if Apple was catering to the wealthy with its products, like the first-generation Apple Watch Edition which was priced at a whopping $10,000. However that is a notion that Apple’s CEO Tim Cook wants to dispel. In a recent interview with Fortune, Cook told Adam Lashinsky that Apple’s products aren’t made for the rich, or at least not specifically so.
When asked how Apple can say they make products for everyone but yet price them so high, Cook responded by saying, “Well it’s not high margin. I wouldn’t use that word. There’s a lot of companies that have much higher margins. We price for the value of our products. And we try to make the very best products. And that means we don’t make commodity kind of products.”
He goes on to add, “But if you look across our product lines, you can buy an iPad today for under $300. You can buy an iPhone, depending upon which one you select, for in that same kind of ballpark. And so these are not for the rich. We obviously wouldn’t have over a billion products that are in our active installed base if we were making them for the rich because that’s a sizable number no matter who’s looking at the numbers.”
That being said, Apple’s upcoming iPhone X is rumored to cost upwards of $1,000, which is higher than any iPhone has ever cost (at least for the base model), so it remains to be seen exactly how many units they will be able to sell.