Industry pundit Nick Carr is taken aback by the $13,000 price tag on our new top-end Mac Pro with an eight-core processor, 16 gigs of RAM and 4x750GB hard drives. “Didn’t anyone tell Jobs that these things are supposed to be commodities?” he writes. (I can hear his hands wringing from all the way across the country.)

Not sure I get it. Oh wait. I guess $13,000 is a lot of money for some people? I don’t know. It’s been so long since I carried cash or actually paid for anything that I don’t really have much sense of prices anymore. And living out here in the Valley where everyone basically has more money than they can ever spend, well it kind of skews your perspective.

Thing is, Nick Carr, here at Apple we don’t build to price. And unlike a lot of other companies, we don’t sit around trying to guess what customers want or — worse yet — asking customers what they want. God only knows what they’d come up with. Probably they’d just sit there shrugging and eating donuts in the focus group room. Fact is customers never know what they want. If they did they’d all be running tech companies right? They’re looking to us to tell them what they want. That’s what we’re here for. That’s our job. So you know what we do? We build what we think is cool. We build the products we’d like to own. And yeah, a $13,000 souped-up Macintosh is gonna be pretty popular in the centimillionaire-Silicon-Valley-engineer crowd. Trust me. We know what we’re doing.