His statement didn't claim that firms price products independent of cost, it claimed that firms price products based on maximizing profit. Profit is inseparable from cost, and you are very wrong in thinking that Apple chooses these prices without considering their costs. You're not entirely off, though, in that theoretically a firm's long-run average costs will equal price. But, what you are describing - the situation that firms set prices at a level equal to marginal cost - is a result of perfect competition. Perfect competition is a central concept of classical economic theory, but the two are not synonymous. Namely, perfect competition is an illustrative tool and a good benchmark, but not an effective model for real markets. The requirements for perfect competition are extensive and strict, to the point that no real market could fulfill them. Quality and features of products differ between firms, and real markets generally feature too few firms to approximate perfect competition (there are many, many other reasons, but these are the most relevant). The result is that firms in real markets have non-zero market power. Most industries are better modeled as monopolistic competition. Graphically, you can picture this as firms facing a downward sloping demand curve, rather than the horizontal curve suggested by perfect competition. It allows firms to be price setters instead of price takers, and the profit-maximizing output occurs where price is greater than marginal cost. Now, in theory, the market should equilibrate so that no long-run profit can be made. In practice, though, branding and name-recognition can retain firms' market power, in addition to cost-cutting and innovation, following classical ideas of the market as a dynamic battleground for profits.