But, in fact, the typical contemporary car
doesn't come with a full-size spare tire! (Thanks for making my point for me.) Most models ship with a temporary little "donut" spare not rated for sustained driving but sufficient to get one to a repair facility; others use so-called "run-flat" tires and are provided without a spare at all, or include tire sealant and an onboard compressor.
The analogy is flawed in any case, because upgrading an iMac to an iMac—which is what grelber did—would be like upgrading a Chevy to a new
Chevy. Further, your reasoning for how to assign a theoretical upcharge for a spare tire is absurd; there's no reason at all to equate the proportionate value of a spare tire to that of a USB installer drive. It's much more likely that Chevy ("Repair kits are standard in most General Motors Co. cars and crossovers, but customers can add a spare to most vehicles for an extra $100 to $150") adds a margin (say, $60) to the cost of providing a donut—just as Apple does with the the USB installer.
No, the true outrage with the USB installer is the size of the margin relative to the cost of providing it. And while this margin
percentagewise clearly exceeds that of the typical overpriced Apple upgrade (RAM being the classic example), in absolute terms it's pretty negligible. That was really my point—all this hue and cry is being raised over what amounts to a sixty-buck penalty for refusing to get with the broadband program. And, if you haven't looked lately, Apple has been steering the entire company towards high-speed, always-connected devices and services for quite awhile now, and applying a tariff to dial-up users is fully consistent with that trajectory.
Yes, $69 for a USB stick is a bit pricey. But, sorry, it just doesn't rate High Dudgeon.
