The myth of the Apple Tax is officially dead

By the time this article is published, there will only be four days to go until Black Friday, the most magical and beloved day of the year. I hope you’ve put up your decorations.

At this time of year, tech fans can pick up bargains (while avoiding non-bargains) on products that would otherwise be outside their budget. But as an Apple fan, I always feel an inexplicable sense of second-hand embarrassment. “Will there be Apple Store discounts on iPhones?” friends ask me with naive optimism. No, I have to answer. There will just be gift cards.

That’s not to say that you won’t see any discounts on Apple products: there are plenty to be had already. It’s just that the discounts will be offered by other retailers. Buy direct from Apple and you’ll pay not one cent less than MSRP, while receiving a moderately generous gift card you can use on your next purchase. It’s almost like the company wants to help out its reseller partners by pushing business their way.

This lack of direct discounts shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course. Partly because Apple always does the gift card thing, but also because it doesn’t do bargains more generally. Certainly not in the sense of sudden, time-limited, slightly panicky price drops you have to pounce on before they’re gone. It simply doesn’t feel the need to compete, either on price or for attention; after years of nurturing a sense of community, even tribalism, Apple knows that customers will come to it, rather than the other way around.

Apple doesn’t do out-and-out cheap products, either. These days, you can find a perfectly decent Android phone for less than $250, or even $200 if you’re willing to make some sacrifices, but that’s not a market Apple is interested in. This time last year, the iPhone SE sat at the top of the budget category, starting at $429 by March, but that was phased out in favor of the defiantly mid-market (and in my opinion ill-conceived) $599 iPhone 16e. It suits Apple’s purposes to focus on selling a smaller number of higher-margin handsets, knowing that each iPhone owner represents a micro-advert to their friends. Ultra-budget phones are not aspirational.

All of this might make it sound like I subscribe to the idea of the Apple Tax, that proverbial premium supposedly added on to the prices of iPhones, Macs, and the like for no good reason other than Apple customers being gullible enough to pay it. But I don’t. Apple doesn’t do cheap, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t do value, as we’ve seen this past year in particular. Cupertino steers clear of the true budget market but consistently offers strong value with its mid-market products.

My favorite release of 2025, for example, is the Apple Watch SE 3, which delivers so much bang for its 249 bucks that I was obliged to advise readers to choose it over the fuller-featured Series 11. You don’t need to pay $399 to get an excellent watch because Apple has significantly raised its game at the lower price point.

There’s also the iPhone 17, which starts at the same $799 but has a slew of upgrades over last year’s model, including double the storage, a pro-caliber display, and a higher-end selfie camera. It’s a fantastic value.

This year’s M4 MacBook Air, which got a new chip and an upgraded camera, actually saw a price drop of $100 compared with the previous version, which is basically unheard of in Cupertino. Apple fans can now get the latest-generation Air for under a grand (or right now under $750 if you take advantage of Amazon’s Black Friday sale.) Don’t get me wrong: Chromebook prices these are not. But you won’t find a tax for the sake of a brand name either.

Having dispelled that particular myth, it becomes less of a surprise to hear reports that Apple is planning to release a cluster of cheap products in the spring of 2026. And by cheap, of course, I mean sensibly affordable: $599 for the iPhone 17e, $699-$899 for the new budget MacBook, and hopefully not much more than $349 for the newly AI-compliant 11th-gen iPad.

So sure: they’re not the sort of prices that make you set your alarm on Black Friday. They’re not doorbuster deals. But they’re good products at good prices, and that’s something to be praised all year round.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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