[WS:] OK. I take this point back. However, the rest of my argument about conspicuous consumption and appeal to snobbery stands.
JC: "But in any case, we end up filling the pockets of capitalist enterprises."
[WS:] I is a bit more complex than that. Buying any product means filling the pockets of people who sell it. This holds for any social system. And this is not necessarily a bad thing - people who make and sell things provide a service to society and need to be paid. Far more important is what kind of service is being remunerated. Or to put it in Marxist terms: the ratio of use value to exchange value of the product.
The problem with many Western corporations is that the ratio of use to exchange value is relatively low. That is, the buyers pay an increasingly larger amount for the corporate logo and image. Again, in Marxist terms this is a classic example of commodity fetishism. The corporate image, backed by advertising blitz, is supposed to address some social or emotional issue. Capitalists got quite good at monetizing that particular aspect of capitalism.
As I sad before, Apple is not alone doing this. There is a whole bunch of other corporations doing this: Starbucks, Whole Foods, Pottery Barn, Anthropologie and sundry other brand names populating shopping malls. The point I am trying to make is that you do not have to fall for the game these corporations play, you do not have buy their image and their advertising blitz. You have a choice of going to places that offer you comparable merchandise with a higher use to exchange value rate. Of course, it is not that it is going to topple capitalism or even change much in it - it is just a small act of resistance against the tyranny of the market (another cute concept proposed by Bourdieu). That is it.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."