Let’s get some experts involved. They are going to tell us that we are comparing apples to oranges when we look at Neo and Ultra. “They have very different goals, very different audiences. We are talking about a health device compared to laptop for general use. And so the prices shouldn’t be comparable because they do very different things,” says Jitesh Ubrani, director of research at IDC.
The thing is, I don’t think the average consumer cares. But they care about money. And now they see an embarrassing price difference for Apple products.
Terry White, Adobe’s leading global advocate for design and photography, certainly thinks so. He posted that the Neo shows that Apple’s iPad accessories are too expensive. “To get the same 256GB of storage on the base iPad, it costs $449 (and a slower chip),” he wrote. Add to that the $249 Magic Keyboard Folio, which matches the Mac form factor, and you’re paying $698. We used to wonder if the iPad could replace a laptop. Now the real question is why replace a laptop Is it $100 more for the iPad?
Ubrani admits that when comparing the Apple Watch SE to the base Apple Watch and the Ultra, “you could say that the SE offers 95% of the experience of the base, which in turn offers 95% of the experience of the Ultra. But the price difference between these models is huge. Huge”. He agrees that the Ultra is aimed at a group of users who will pay a lot more for diving ability and rugged construction. He adds: “You charge a premium for it simply because you can and because people will pay for it.”
How many people pay this huge premium? IDC has just released estimates for Apple Watch sales. In 2025, Apple is reported to have shipped 41.1 million Apple Watches. “Over the course of the year, Ultra accounted for nearly 3.5 million of those,” Ubrani says, adding that Ultra sales were down year-on-year “due to the lack of a significant upgrade.” Still, Apple convinced more than 8% of watch buyers to pay hundreds of dollars more for a premium model.
Balbir Singh, Global Analyst smart watch At Counterpoint Research, he believes that Apple can practically set the price of its products, especially if they are more expensive and already in the ecosystem. “They know the mentality of the consumer who will eventually buy. They know they have a niche of adventurous and sporty users who need something from Apple for the loyal customer, the iPhone user,” he says.
Apple’s entry-level MacBook Neo costs $599 laptop the most affordable company to date.
In numbers
Apple may be greedy in raising the price of the watch by hundreds of dollars, but it’s certainly not stupid. You know that Garmin’s flagship dive watch costs around $800, and you want to attract those potential customers. He doesn’t want people to experience an alternative ecosystem.
“They don’t want to charge so much that they lose that customer to someone else. An example would be Garmin. Apple has seen what its competitors are doing and doesn’t want to offer something noticeably cheaper. Apple needs to make sure it doesn’t lose customers to a competing computing platform, but still charge as much as it can and get away with it,” says Ubrani.
