You are still not getting it. You seem to think the price of the devices do not have built in prices for the os's. You are truly confused. Apple is not giving anything away just because they have a built in price to cover it. The "apple tax" is part of it.
You are the kind of customer apple loves.
My wife has a 17" laptop, windows, HD screen, 12gb memory, newest i7, discreet nvidia graphics, etc. The closest macbook is 2400 dollars us and still not 17", hers was under 900. Do you TRULY think apple does not have the price of several versions of os in there? Probably from here to eternity. If you buy used then someone already paid for the os's, period. Just because YOU do not have to pay when you get a used computer does not mean it wasn't paid for, someone already did and they high resale price (because they were expensive to begin with) passes it on to you but that has nothing to do with apple as the original purchaser has more than paid for all of those updates.
Apple has done a good job of brainwashing, they more than get paid for the os's.
You are absolutely confused. Anyone that thinks apple became a multi billion dollar company by giving stuff away is confused. It's paid for. No businesses give stuff away as they are doing it to make money, it's figured in there somewhere guaranteed.
I have a mac, but this is the last one.
i have bought used cars that still had warranties and I got repairs FREE. If you buy a car that is still under warranty it's like saying the same thing, I am getting free repairs. Someone paid for that warranty even if it was not listed as a price on the invoice. Period. It's like apple is warrantying the os's until they stop for that device. It's something like three updates for ios and longer for pc's. I know you will say it is not a warranty, it is. It's transferrable to the next owner just like a car warranty and you have to register it with apple/icloud to get them. It's just a different type of warranty, but believe me it's paid for.
I am not sure, who is not getting it.
Dissecting the price of a product and claiming or assuming that something that is provided with it is or isn't free
is in that price is mildly put ignorant.
Of course nothing is for free in life. But, as I stated I did not have to pay for the last several FREE OSX versions
and I didn't buy any Mac.
So, did somebody else pay for my 3 free versions. And, to illustrate your flawed thinking, how often and how many times do others pay for everybody elses free upgrades?
And, at what percentage are future OSX versions included in the hardware?
Without knowing the exact calculation of a product we both do not know to what extent OSX costs are included in what.
If you know anything about business there are a lot of overhead costs which have to be covered and run against the gross sales margins. From cost of goods, R& D, advertising, wages, just to mention a few EVERYTHING is included in a products price at a percentage.
The "Apple tax" is based on mostly high quality products which last. They have had their line of crappy products and flaws, but overall once you buy a MAC you have certain advantages which PCs cannot offer.
For starters Macs can run both PCs and Mac system software.
I am sorry if you cannot get that one cannot extract the price of system software from a hardware product.
With your logic, I might as well tell myself I buy the OSX for $ 2,499 and the MacBook Pro at that price is FREE.