Except for the very first iPhone that sold for the full price without subsidies or special carrier deals, most any iPhone can be mostly affordable. So if the unlocked purchase price, which starts at $399 for the entry-level iPhone SE, is daunting, you can always put it on our credit card or take advantage of special lease/purchase deals from the carrier or, if you prefer, Apple.

Such leasing programs as AT&T Next allow you to upgrade your gear on a regular basis, say 12 or 18 months, before the device is paid off. You only need to return it to the carrier when you buy a new model. This particular program, if kept up, would lock you in to buying new gear regularly, thus guaranteeing continuing sales for carriers and handset makers.

Although some of Apple’s critics would love to see the company sell cheaper iPhones, that’s not in the cards. The only way to make them cheaper would be to sacrifice profits, and that’s not Apple’s plan either, except by tiny amounts.

But with rumors spreading about a special iPhone to honor the product’s 10th anniversary, a published report in Fast Company claims it’ll be the most expensive one yet.

Now if you can believe the features listed so far for a product variously known as the iPhone 8 or the iPhone X, it’ll have an edge-to-edge OLED display, a 5.1-inch or 5.2-inch display, curved glass, glass backing, an A11 processor and wireless charging, plus the usual enhancements to the cameras and other components.

Since the raw components may be more expensive, Fast Company claims, based on an alleged source familiar with Apple’s marketing plans, that the price will soar to over $1,000.

So the first question is whether the enhancements listed above are worth adding at least $250 to the usual purchase price of a “Plus” series iPhone. Or whether it will even happen.

Don’t forget that such an iPhone wouldn’t be the first mobile handset to feature an edge-to-edge OLED display or wireless charging. Although it’s been heavily discounted, and will soon be replaced by a newer model, the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge has the edge-to-edge OLED display and wireless charging. Prices start at $849. Also bear in mind that premium Samsung smartphones are usually priced in the same league as iPhones ahead of those two-for-one sales.

More to the point, would the enhanced hardware justify such a higher price? It doesn’t seem so.

I wouldn’t dispute the possibility that it must cost more, perhaps $100 or thereabouts, consistent with the price increase of the roughly equivalent Samsung handset compared to regular Galaxy smartphones. If that’s the case, a 256GB iPhone 8 — or whatever it’s called — could cost $1,069, which would be $100 more than the equivalent iPhone 7 Plus. The standard 32GB version would be $869. So maybe the story is credible even if it overlooks some details.

The problem with stories of this sort is that they can generate fear. You’ll have all those goodies in the next iPhone — features that many buyers would crave — but you’d have to pay through the nose for them, so start saving your pennies.

It also fits with the meme that Apple gear is overpriced, that you can easily buy comparable or better products for far less. Well, unless it’s a Microsoft Surface PC that is often priced higher than roughly equivalent Macs. Clearly Microsoft knows where to market its products to endure maximum profits.

Now I suppose that Apple could make the 10th anniversary iPhone a premium model with a single maxed out configuration; thus 256GB storage. That would not make it necessarily overpriced, though I’d think Apple would want to offer them in several configurations to better meet the needs of customers. Some might be perfectly willing to trade storage for a lower price.

But the argument over Apple’s price policies will never end. The company historically makes fairly high profits on its products. That does not mean they should be cheaper, or that making them cheaper would meet the needs of Apple and its shareholders. I’d love to see cheaper Macs, for example, similarly equipped to the models available now.

You might suggest that the latest MacBook Pro is overpriced, because it costs several hundred dollars more than the previous model. The 13-inch version with a Touch Bar carries a $300 premium over the model without that feature. But the Touch Bar version has other upgrades, including a faster processor, a speedier memory bus, better graphics, and two additional Thunderbolt 3 ports. That’s probably enough to cover at least part of the price increase. So I suppose you could say it still costs too much, although the price of admission doesn’t seem to have hurt sales much.

It’s also true that Apple has a tendency to charge higher prices for the first year or two of a brand new product’s lifecycle. Take the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display, which began life at $2,499 but quickly got cheaper as more configurations were added. Don’t forget that the first MacBook Pro with Retina display, which appeared in 2012, was introduced at prices comparable to present levels. So maybe refreshes will be cheaper.

As to other Apple products: The argument that the Apple Watch is too expensive doesn’t wash anymore since it owns the market. Even its biggest competitor, Fitbit, bought two companies, including Pebble, to better compete in the smartwatch space, but is now shedding employees after a soft holiday quarter.

I’d love to see Apple charge less for its gadgets. You might think competitive pressures would force them in that direction, but clearly not yet.

It’s true that reactions to Apple are polarizing. In recent days, I’ve written perfectly ordinary articles about possible future Macs, and received comments from readers who are concerned that Apple isn’t building the Mac of their dreams. These responses have extended across two articles so far, and perhaps this column will be the third.

So let’s end that discussion here: That Apple chooses to earn a profit from the sales of its products is not a reason to damn that company, to assume it doesn’t care about its customers. Why not both? Apple clearly succeeds because hundreds of millions of people continue to buy their products, and the satisfaction rate is, as some have suggested, usually off the charts.

Now that doesn’t meet Apple meets the needs of all its customers, or all potential customers. Clearly that’s not possible. Since Apple deliberately restricts the number of models and model variations it builds, customers may have to compromise if they choose Apple. Unfortunately, some people appear to want to turn this into a deliberate betrayal of the customer in favor of Apple’s priorities that, once again, somehow are intended to ignore your needs.

The illogic in this belief is simple: If Apple builds additional Macs, additional iPhones and additional iPads, you would assume they’d all be priced in a way that delivers similar margins. Nothing would be lost, other than simplicity. But Apple long ago choose to keep the model lineups fairly small.

Besides, it’s silly to suggest that Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Samsung are any less interested in maximizing sales and profits in accordance with their own marketing plans. Let’s not forget that Surface computers aren’t exactly cheap, nor are the high-end versions of Samsung smartphones. They, too, build high-end gear that delivers higher profits.

Yet another claim is that Apple deliberately designs its gear to last a finite amount of time, and loads new operating systems with features that don’t work on older gear. Thus you will be tempted — or forced — to continue to buy new products. That’s true for most manufacturers. Car makers hope that the new features in the latest models will tempt you to trade in that old car even if still runs reliably. Obviously Microsoft hopes you’ll upgrade to Windows 10, and Samsung hopes you’ll be eagerly awaiting the next Galaxy smartphone.

So how does that make Apple any worse or different from any other company?

All right, it’s Apple.

Besides, I hardly think Apple has gone overboard to drop support for older gear with its operating systems. You can run macOS Sierra on any Mac from 2010 and later, and some from 2009. Imagine having a Mac nearly eight years old that can still run the latest and greatest operating system. That doesn’t show a deliberate effort to make older gear obsolete. True, some features will not run on the vintage Macs, but that is no reason for Apple not to develop those features.

For iOS gear, it takes three or four years before your iPhone and iPad is no longer supported. With smartphones, most people will have upgraded by then. Of course, you can’t compare any of this with Android gear, since most of the mobile handsets and tablets are running older versions of that OS and will probably never be able to be upgraded. It’s a very different situation.

Certainly, it’s fair to argue whether Apple’s design priorities have changed from the tastes of Steve Jobs in the years since Tim Cook took over the company. But just quoting Jobs isn’t going to cut it, because he was famous for changing his opinions. Guessing what he might have done might be fun, but it has no realistic value. Besides, Jobs famously told Cook never to consider what he would have done in making any decision. That would simply stall the company and prevent it from moving forward.

So imagine Cook and his cronies holding meetings in incense-filled rooms deciding how to build products that meet artistic priorities that have no connection with the needs of the customer. Maybe that’s true to some extent, and it’s fair to argue that the Mac Pro and Late 2016 MacBook Pros were designed in ways that yield no significant advantages to the customer.

But Apple is not a democracy. They are not obligated to build gear to confirm to your design sensibilities. It’s about compromise and setting priorities, or just because they can.

So, for example, Apple could have made it possible for the MacBook Pro to use 32GB of RAM. The tradeoff of using a different memory controller would have meant slower memory and shorter battery life. Apple chose to maximize performance and achieve decent battery life. A future Intel processor will allow for using more RAM without the tradeoff.

Perhaps Apple could have simply refreshed the MacBook Pro with new parts and left the design alone. That wouldn’t have prevented the use of the Touch Bar.

It all comes down to this: If Apple isn’t making the gear you want, tell them so. Send feedback explaining that you aren’t going to spend hard-earned money on their gadgets until they come closer to meeting your needs. If enough people do that, and sales suffer accordingly, I fully expect that things will change. But not when sales continue to grow.

Or just go elsewhere and find another company that better meets your needs.

The other day, readers commented on an article in our latest newsletter about the future of the Mac, complaining that Apple wasn’t building the Macs they wanted. In writing that piece, I basically assumed there would be no entirely new models, that what Apple planned was to refresh existing gear. Indeed, I have written several pieces about the future — or lack thereof — of the Mac Pro, since it hasn’t been touched since 2013.

Now I can see legitimate reasons for Apple to discontinue this costly model. One may be that it doesn’t sell very well, but that may also be due to the fact that the current model — with the price unchanged — could have been refreshed with faster processors and graphics by now. So what is Apple waiting for?

It may be that the Mac Pro was a misfire. The previous model allowed for a decent amount of internal expansion, with multiple drives and peripheral cards. You could even place two Intel Xeon processors in there. For the 2013 model, Apple made it thin, light, minimalist. So it was limited to one SSD, and one processor. To some it may well have been crippled in the interests of design priorities that pros didn’t care about.

So what if Apple is planning on a major revision to the Mac Pro, slightly larger, with more internal expansion possibilities, thus making it closer in concept to the original? Is that even possible?

Well, since it is being built in the U.S., you many not read about supply chain chatter about any such changes. The 2013 Mac Pro, therefore, came as more of a surprise than usual — good, bad or otherwise — in terms of is final look and capabilities. But does a major change even make sense?

Since Tim Cook’s promises “great desktops” in its product roadmap, it won’t be restricted to a single model (the iMac). The Mac Pro may merely be a routine refresh, but Apple will probably have to wait for the launch of the workstation-class Skylake-W processors later this year.

Now it’s also true that many former Mac Pro users have since gone with the 27-inch iMac, as I have. I was able to buy a souped up Late 2009 iMac and an external backup drive with the proceeds from selling off an older Mac Pro and 30-inch Dell display. I even had a few hundred dollars extra with which to pay some bills. If you don’t need all the external expandability of the Mac Pro, the high-end iMac’s quad-core processor actually delivers measurably faster performance. That equation only changes when you run an app that benefits from extra processing cores, and there aren’t many.

So what about a professional iMac configuration? Well, it’s fair to say it’s already a pro-class machine, with the 5K Retina display. Are there any faster processors available? Well, Intel had an eight-core i7 in the lineup, but I don’t see one listed for the Kaby Lake family, at least not yet. But Intel is due to launch Skylake-E desktop CPUs, in 6-core, 8-core and 10-core versions, in the second quarter of the year, which would probably make them suitable for a summer launch. So if there’s going to be a special version of the iMac, maybe it will come after the regular version is launched, in time for the WWDC.

Other than a high-end CPU, such an iMac might include the capability of managing two 5K external displays, extra USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, and the ability to order a version with two internal SSDs. Suddenly we’re talking about iMacs that could be configured in ways that would drive the price to north of $5,000. But it might be a worthy Mac Pro replacement, or a half-way measure in the drive to push more users away in anticipation of eventually killing Apple’s workstation.

Another potential desktop Mac is a high-end Mac mini, available with speedier processors and twin SSDs. This would be a potential Mac counterpart to the HP Z2.

But remember that as many as three quarters of new Macs sold are notebooks. Apple isn’t in the business of offering too many models, so my theories about souped up versions might work against that philosophy.

So it may well be that Apple doesn’t plan on any additional desktop or notebook machines. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t room for high-end versions of the Mac mini and the iMac?

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Demands that Apple deliver cheaper Macs won’t happen, however. That’s never been Apple’s philosophy. If the Mac mini doesn’t make it for you, and you want something cheaper, you might consider a low-end Windows PC or a Chromebook, and market forces probably don’t justify any change in Apple’s current product mix.

The long and short is that Apple has never delivered every single model a customer might want. While there is a limited ability to upgrade the internal components, that’s about the size of it. With Macs sales keeping pace with the PC market once again, why should that change? If anything, Apple might be more inclined to focus on dual ARM/Intel processor variations. But I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of a few high-end/high-profit configurations for power users and businesses.

At one time, it as felt that personal computers, in the twilight of the PC era, would serve the job as pickup trucks. Regular people would rely on “sedans,” tablets, to perform most computing functions. At least that’s what Steve Jobs told us. I won’t compare this to the American auto industry, where people have begun to choose trucks, SUVs and crossovers over sedans.

In any case, iPad sales kept climbing from its introduction in 2010 through 2013. Then it hit the wall, as sales began to drop the following year, a trend that continues across the tablet market to this very day.

PC sales mostly continue to fall. The Microsoft Surface lineup had a 2% sales decrease during the holiday quarter. Mac sales climbed to 5.4 million from 5.3 million, but some will remind us that Apple’s December quarter actually had an extra week, so if you follow week-by-week sales, there was a small drop. Choose which version you want.

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