I understand and appreciate that you don't find value in their products. That's your call and not anyone else's to make.
But where you're making a mistake is assuming that value in the market is tied to Apple's internal costs of making a product. That an Apple laptop is not a good value, because its price is 30% above the costs to produce it.
That's not a useful definition of value. Value is the utility people get from a product, relative to the cost they incurred in obtaining the product.
Suppose a computer manufacturer produces a real stinking pile of garbage laptop. It's hard to use, the screen flickers, keys break, you name it. But it's half the price of the existing lowest cost product, and they're only making 1% gross margins on it. Is that a good value? If you value your ability to get anything done on it, probably not. What their margin was on it really doesn't matter.
Similarly, many people value the product attributes of an Apple laptop so highly (they see fewer bugs, ease of use, productivity, etc) that the fact that it costs so much more than what they could get elsewhere doesn't translate to a poorer value, because they get so much more out of it. Imagine a professional, for example, who is 10% more productive on a Macbook than a Dell laptop. Their time is worth $100 an hour. Suppose the price difference was $1k. In as little as 100 hours of work -- two weeks' of use -- they begin realizing better value from that MacBook than the Dell.
Now, those numbers are facetious, but the principle stands: it's quite easy for a more costly product with higher margins for the manufacturer to be a better value to the buyer than a less costly product from a manufacturer with lower margins.
But where you're making a mistake is assuming that value in the market is tied to Apple's internal costs of making a product. That an Apple laptop is not a good value, because its price is 30% above the costs to produce it.
That's not a useful definition of value. Value is the utility people get from a product, relative to the cost they incurred in obtaining the product.
Suppose a computer manufacturer produces a real stinking pile of garbage laptop. It's hard to use, the screen flickers, keys break, you name it. But it's half the price of the existing lowest cost product, and they're only making 1% gross margins on it. Is that a good value? If you value your ability to get anything done on it, probably not. What their margin was on it really doesn't matter.
Similarly, many people value the product attributes of an Apple laptop so highly (they see fewer bugs, ease of use, productivity, etc) that the fact that it costs so much more than what they could get elsewhere doesn't translate to a poorer value, because they get so much more out of it. Imagine a professional, for example, who is 10% more productive on a Macbook than a Dell laptop. Their time is worth $100 an hour. Suppose the price difference was $1k. In as little as 100 hours of work -- two weeks' of use -- they begin realizing better value from that MacBook than the Dell.
Now, those numbers are facetious, but the principle stands: it's quite easy for a more costly product with higher margins for the manufacturer to be a better value to the buyer than a less costly product from a manufacturer with lower margins.