For years, Apple gear has been regarded as expensive, sometimes in the luxury class. Thus owners of such products were regarded as well-off, elites, or people who just didn’t understand the value of a dollar; well, make that whatever currency you use in your country.
I know that when I first brought a Mac into my home, in 1989, I did price shop, not that there were many dealers who managed the full product line. In the end, I chose the shop from which my employer bought their Apple gear after having been assured I’d pay the same price they did.
Now it was a different world, and you couldn’t buy cheap PCs for a few hundred dollars at the neighborhood supermarket. It was a serious purchase even though Apple’s pricing lay at the high-end of the market. While Macs were offered fully assembled, you could — and still could — assemble a PC from the parts. Sometimes you’d save a good deal of money, at the expense of having to assemble everything, configure device drivers and so on and so forth.