On top of that, premium brands are the opposite of harmful. They push non-premium brands to iterate. The features that were in BMW/Audi/Mercedes in 90s are now in affordable cars. If nobody made premium cars back then, most that technology would have never made it to market. Same about Apple and cheap laptops. Cheap laptops nowadays are times better than what was available a decade ago. If there were no Macbooks to look up to, why abandon flimsy plastic laptops?