Look... without getting into the insanely boring MS vs. Apple pissing contests... I guess in the jealousy driven minds of some, that "could" be a reason, but the real reason that Apple products tend to hold their value so well in resale is much the same reason that some vehicle makes retain their value. They DON'T discount much if ever on new product. It's that simple... There's no mass purchase discounts, flash sales, rebates, back room price cuts, or the like. Pretty much the price you see is the price you pay. Like I said, this is also what keeps Honda resale prices above their peers for the most part. Add that to the face that like Honda, the devices are generally still in good usable shape after a short period of time, maintain their usefulness, and still have demand...thus you get a decent return at resale.
So... You can call them overpriced all you want... or you can call them higher retained value devices. I prefer to think of most of Apple's products as the latter.
The reality is that the SP3 is a fine and wonderful device (but not perfect... not even close). If anything, like many MS products, it is suffering from another tragic mis-marketing campaign. They're making it out to be something that it can't be. They're writing checks that it's thermal capacity can't cash... Does that mean it's terrible? No, of course not. But if you're going to go out there hawking about replacing laptops... you better have the chops to back it up, and there is where I'm afraid they're falling flat. If they'd come out and just said, "the most powerful tablet ever, that can also do most of what you need from a laptop" then things would be different. Look... maybe they figure out a way to open the SP3 up without it melting to pieces. I'm personally hoping that they do. But while I'm not one of these crybabies running around screaming that the sky is falling... I'm not some rah rah brainless cheerleader either.
And yes, Apple's had plenty of clunkers over the years... How's that Apple HiFi doing? Anyone remember antennagate? How bout the cracking cubes? Remember the 3rd Gen iPad that got outperformed by the iPad 2? (By the way...I think that is the closest situation I can compare the SP3 to being) That being said however, even if it twists undergarments, Apple has established a brand that many believe (in my opinion, rightly so) generally produces mature, stable, and generally expectation meeting/exceeding consumer products. MS on the other hand has not done the same in anywhere close to the same vein with their physical product over the years.
