Some may say this is due to lack of innovation and while that’s probably true so some extent, there’s only so much you can innovate in a given product category.

I think part of the “problem” are their more and more confusing product lineups. In many cases it feels like the lower tier products only exist so they can upsell a potential customer to a higher end product.

For the iPhone, once you align the storage size, the base and the Pro model are like $200 apart. That’s a lot of money, but relatively speaking in the $1000 area, it’s not a huge gap. If you want a cheap phone, the cheapest one Apple offers is the iPhone SE starting at $429 for a 64 GB model and SoC aside it’s just horribly outdated (screen, battery, chassis etc.). I’d like to have a cheap iPhone to recommend to people, but $429 isn’t really cheap (it looks even worse in European prices) and it’s so gutted you wouldn’t recommend it to your worst enemy.

Same with the base iPad. It’s no longer a cheap device, it’s quite expensive. And when you look at it, it’s basically a worse version of the iPad Air 4 at about the same pricing the Air 4 originally had. The screen isn’t laminated and their Pencil solution is a complete joke. Few weeks ago they launched a third pencil, so now you have to choose between three damn pencils and it’s just confusing. Oh, and of course the base iPad and the current iPad Air 5 (and the mini) start at 64 GB, with the next step being 256 GB. This is obviously on purpose because I bet many people would want 128 GB (64 GB is barely usable nowadays, with iOS already taking a big chunk out of it), but they have to get 256 GB. The base 128 GB Pro is only $100 more than the Air 256 GB, so you’ll probably be inclined to get the Pro.

The new base model M3 MacBook Pro is a stripped-down version of the previous entry model, and while it’s cheaper at $1599, it’s also so gutted with its 8 GB of RAM that you’ll likely upgrade anyways, and once you upgrade to 16 GB you’re so close to the “M3 Pro” model (yes, both the SoC and the device itself can have the same “Pro” suffix, so there is an M3 MacBook Pro and an M3 Pro MacBook Pro) which is just so much better (faster CPU and GPU, one more USB-C port, supports more external screens etc.). Their RAM and SSD upgrade pricing for their Macs is a complete joke to be honest. It either stagnated or got more expensive for many, many years while the rest of the industry moved on and SSDs especially are dirt cheap normally.

It’s confusing and it’s obvious that models below the best/most expensive one only exist to upsell customers to said most expensive one. Sure, upselling has been a big part of Apple’s strategy for quite some time now, but at least their cheaper products felt like complete packages. The iPad Air 4 was solid, and the current base iPad in the same price region is just silly with the Pencil setup. The white MacBook was quite solid, even when there was a 13" Pro model that was obviously better, the base white one was still good and a decent amount cheaper if you didn’t need specific features. The iPhone SE 2020 was competitively priced to what was out there in the $300-400 market back then, the current SE competes in pricing with the likes of the Pixel 7a, which is just so much better.

It’s obviously greed, they’re testing the waters, seeing how far they can push it.