That's an interesting take on it, and yes I get that the dimms for this are newer tech. But ever since I've been buying macs (1985) the model that has always hit the sweet spot for the specs I wanted/was willing to pay was $3k. That continued until the iPhone came out, Steve Jobs died, and Apple changed from an innovative company making powerful products for people to create with, to a lifestyle company. Now the specs I want are about $10k, that's a little ahead of inflation.
I've worked on Macs my whole adult life and the last thing I want to do is switch to windows, and I won't. But it's increasingly annoying having to deal with a company that sells smoke as much as anything else. As Robin Williams said 'Gucci could put a stripe on a turd and sell it for a nice profit.'
Yeah I can't argue that. Apple is more of a lifestyle brand than a computer company these days... That said, I think they started moving in this direction with the iPod and original iMac. iMac created a huge market of nick nacks that were playing off of the iMac's appearance, and the iPod paved the way for the iPhone... Either way, definitely true...
The other point I'd mention though is that similarly specced pre-configured PCs, (HP, Dell, etc), get pretty darned expensive too. (And can go
WAY beyond the cost of Apple.) Although you can piece together a DIY PC dirt cheap, you can build a Hackintosh for the same cost, and there's a big part of the PC market that buys pre-configured machines, e.g. infrastructure.
Just piecing together an 18 core Xeon, similarly benchmarked to the iMac Pro, with 64GB ram and 2TB m.2 drive, on HP's site and I was just shy of 10k... Add a 16GB Radeon with equal benchmarks as Vega 64 and I was at 11.4k... At Dell I hit 9.5k. (List on both machines was 13k-14k). That makes the iMac Pro actually equally or less expensive for hardware that should perform almost identically...
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about Apple I can't stand. I hate that almost everything's soldered in. And I hate that they're downright evil to small repair shops. (That bothers more than anything.) But PC companies with the same pre-configured business model as Apple are actually in the same price range...
For whatever reason, everyone compares Apple against DIY machines which IMO isn't fair at all since you can DIY a Hackintosh for the exact same cost as the same PC... (And pay extra for Windows.) Only difference is Apple doesn't support it, but that's no different than a DIY PC. If you have hardware/software conflicts you still have to do your own troubleshooting...