Apple used to be a boutique brand, but not anymore. Tell me, how many Porsches did you see on the road today, as a proportion of the total number of cars? How many Rolexes, compared to all other watches? Now try doing the same with iPhones, Apple Watches, MacBooks. It's no coincidence that Apple is, or at least was until recently, the world's most valuable company. Do you think Porsche ever came close to this? Rolex? Gucci? Except they're now pricing themselves back to being a boutique brand. The investors are catching up to this, which is why the stock went down. Apple itself is feeling the heat, which is why they're loading up on marketing. But no amount of marketing will sell products that are priced wildly out of the consumer's range.
Now, comparing the prices of 15-year old technology to today's technology is a little more nuanced than that. Try comparing the prices of a top-end 15-year old Dell laptop to something equivalently placed on Dell's lineup today. I'd also suggest comparing the prices of cell phones ever since the launch of the technology until today. They started out very expensive, went down in price because of economies of scale and so on, but in the last few years the price is coming up again, and you can mostly blame Apple for that. If you disagree, when was the last time you paid as much as an iPhone XS Max costs today for a cell phone? Correct for inflation all you want, you're going to have to go back in time a few decades before you can claim that.
I'm not upset about keeping my old devices. I'm just pointing out the experience of one person (myself) who used to upgrade iPhones early and is now priced out of this (whereas if prices had stayed the same as in the iPhone 7 era, I would have still upgraded). The iPad Pro 11" is not just too expensive given that I have a year-old device; it's too expensive, period. In fact, it's a good thing that I have a year-old device, because otherwise I'd have to upgrade, and given that I can't afford the new models, I'd have to look at the prices of last year's models, and most likely would have considered something used/refurbished; I think neither of these situations bodes well for Apple. By the way, this is exactly what happened with a colleague -- can't afford the 2018 MBP, had to find a good discount on last year's model to be able to upgrade. As for my MacBook Pro, considering I spend most of my day in front of it, yes I do lose sleep over the possibility of being priced out of the only computer platform that doesn't make me miserable (I'm familiar enough with Windows and Linux to know).
To sum it up, here's someone who spent, on average, a few thousand dollars per year on Apple gear, and who's going to reduce that substantially or maybe exit the Apple market completely. It's not just an issue of unit sales; Apple is going to see a sharp decrease in revenue unless they bring prices back from the stratosphere.
