Clearly people saw some kind of value in the products yes?
It's akin to Beats by Dre. People value aesthetics and Beats are the best looking headphones out there so people are willing to pay a premium for that.
It's not overpriced if that's the price that people value the product at. It's certainly not inexpensive, and we can have a discussion about the sound quality, but "overpriced" is a term that I think is thrown around too loosely.
The real question here is whether customer satisfaction is a fully sufficient criterion to determine whether or not something is a "ripoff".
For medical goods the answer is a fairly universal "no". For everything else it's more controversial. Is it correct to shortchange your customers as long as they don't know about it and are happy with their purchase? Are Bose's products actually shortchanging their customers, or is it simply satisfying a different set of priorities?
I don't think we'll ever come to anything resembling consensus on the above.
That's a very good way to put it, now that you mention it. I think Apple fits this category pretty well too.
