Thank Steve Jobs

There will be many of these, and deservedly so.

Thank you for being an inspiration to so many.

I'm starting to wonder where this meme comes from. I would hardly call owning a product produced by the most successful company in the world and a household brand being a "hipster".

Apple products are not really overpriced. Try buying a capable iPad-like tablet for less than $499. Try buying something like the 11" Macbook Air for less than $999. The iPhone 3GS is $49 with a two year contract.

Is there a rebel without a cause sensibility about hating Apple?

The only way to win the "Apple is hipster/overpriced" game is to not play it.

Just ignore it and carry on.

To expand on mrk-hn's comment,

I don't think the comparison is entirely without merit. From what I can tell, a lot of the scorn directed at hipsters (or at least the "hipster" archetype/strawperson) stems from fact (or perception) that they value cultural artifacts based on the social status that they can leverage those artifacts for, rather than for any intrinsic value they might have. Compare someone who tells their friends about a band because they like the lyrics of that one song they listened to all the time in high school, vs someone who tells their friends about the same band because they want to be the first to do so, gaining some reputation in the process. (Obviously there are more subtle gradients of behaviors and motivations here, but lets stick to broad strokes.)

Apple's branding and advertising tends to exhibit a similar focus on how their products will improve your status, rather than on the capabilities of the actual hard/software. Consider the 1984 Mac ad, or the iPod silhouette ads. They weren't telling you to buy an iPod because it could hold more songs, they were telling you that if you had an iPod, you could be one of the happy beautiful people dancing on a soundstage. Compare that to a run of GeneriCo (seriously, I've seen it like ten times but I can't recall the brand) ads that have been running for back-to-school PCs on Hulu. The whole thing is a laundry list of features without any context for why they're going to make your life better. And there's a creepy guy hanging on the wall of a girl's dorm room. They haven't even grokked JWZ's level of marketing savvy (http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html) let alone Apple's.

Collide that with some long-standing geek ethics (function over form, a hard-won appreciation for the inner beauty of seemingly ugly tech, etc) and a backlash isn't all that surprising. The hipster thing is just convenient. Hating on them is already a popular internet pastime, so throwing that (as above, somewhat spiritually appropriate) label on Apple is a nice shorthand for showing how much you don't care about how big bezels should be or whether your corners are rounded. It doesn't help that there are a fairly substantial core group of Apple devotees who engage in some absurdly irrational behaviors for status-seeking reasons (which is pretty much what "hipsterism" is all about). Why, our enraged geek wants to know, would anyone stand in line at an Apple store for hours for a new iPhone? THAT IS WHAT THE INTERNET AND FEDEX IS FOR SMAAASH

So, yeah. Extending that to accusations of overpriced-ness is left as an exercise for the reader.