Very true, they are good for consumers who are able to pay more to get online. Back in the early days of android, you definitely wanted to pay more for iphones as the quality difference was so large. Now that quality is more or less equal I guess the selling point is "privacy"? I'm not so sure what the quantifiable price is for that. It depends on how much giving my information out harms me, and I'm not quite seeing the harm. If I do a search from my desktop for a location then the driving directions appear on my phone, then that "privacy violation", or sharing of information between machines, is actually helpful. In fact, both companies want to give consumers what they want, in one case so they buy their phones, in another case, so they click on relevant ads. So what I see is that Apple is simply behind the times on information sharing and is catching up (new mapping service which collects data for example). But once Apple starts sharing information well to provide a good experience like what google provides, then I'm not sure what the selling point will be for paying more.