> I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.
Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less.
Shareholders benefit from increased market share just as much as they do from increasing margins, arguably more. The base iPad and the iPhone SE both "cannibalize" their higher end products, but significantly expand their base. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a $800 MacBook enter their lineup shipping with the same CPU as the iPad.
Considering they're selling a device with a 10.5" touchscreen and an A12 SoC for $500 today, I think they can go even lower than $800 for a device with only a slightly larger LCD and no digitizer.
While they won't be competing with Chromebooks for general education use cases, I could very well see Apple trying to upsell schools on a $599 alternative that happens to run GarageBand, iMovie, and even XCode.
Eh I don't see Apple selling their cheapest education MacBook for $600 instead of $900 simply because one of many components suddenly got significantly cheaper.
I can see them doing that for big volume buys for education. I don't see why they wouldn't just pass on the entire Intel margin to them, getting students using Apple products young has value.
Chromebooks are doing well in education at the moment. If Apple launched a product in that space, they could easily claw half of that back overnight. The ability to run real software is huge, especially for subjects like graphic arts and engineering.
> Considering they're selling a device with a 10.5" touchscreen and an A12 SoC for $500 today, I think they can go even lower than $800 for a device with only a slightly larger LCD and no digitizer.
While there is no digitizer, there is a keyboard and a touchpad. Also, I expect Apple is going to try to keep a gap between the base Mac and the iPad price-wise so they would add to the base storage and maybe RAM.
Then again, considering the pricing on the base iPad, maybe they will bring it down to $600.
Maybe if they take a bet on (or force) the App Store to be the primary method of obtaining software. I’d expect Apple forecasts some amount of yearly revenue per iPhone/iPad and a lower amount per MacBook.
Why do we need to buy so many devices anyway? Why can't I just plug my iPad or iPhone into a dumb dock with a laptop screen and its own storage and battery, and use the CPU and GPU from the phone/ipad?
I don't need VSCode, Docker, or node.js on my phone. I don't want all the clones of the various repositories I'm working on on my phone. Even the best phones lack the RAM, high capacity drives, and video card my computer has. Nor does it have a keyboard or trackpad.
If your phone is good enough to take care of your day to day computing, you can probably get by with an inexpensive all-in-one computer and save the headache of docking.
You'd be surprised how many people would like exactly this, interestingly. There are certainly enough to quite literally pay real money for a somewhat lousy facsimile of the real thing; I know from experience.
Then what is the point in docking at all? Now you have to keep track of what's on the dock and what's on the phone. Plus, by the time you integrate all this into a dock, you basically have something that costs as much as an inexpensive PC, so why bother?
You'll need something to connect all those dock components together so you don't have to run several cables to the phone. Something like a motherboard. So you'll have a full computer sans a cpu.
The Surface Book is exactly this: A (x64 Windows) tablet with a laptop dock that contains a stronger GPU and battery.
One problem is that people expect the CPU power of a laptop, which requires much more power and cooling than the typical tablet. As a consequence in tablet mode a Surface Book has about two hours of battery life.
So far: different architectures. But with this announcement it would make running macOS on a future (or even current) iPad quite feasible, so your kind of dock might become true soon. Apple's new magic iPad keyboards use a lot of weight to balance the heavy screen - might as well make that a battery.
When looking for IDEs or tooling on iOS I still have not found anything remotely professionally usable... (I mean Visual Studio + Reshaper like, not VS Code...) but perhaps somebody could enlighten me...
Because a general purpose device is not good business sense for a company that sells devices. The more they can artificially specialize each thing, the more things you need to buy, and the more money they make. This is a much larger phenomenon than just Apple, or even computers.
An iPhone is a general purpose device compared to an iPod. But maybe Apple has lost the willingness to cannibalise its own sales for the sake of creating stunning new product categories.
You can plug in a USB dock into a lot of Android phones, and if you get a DisplayLink dock, you can add 2-3 monitors. Keyboard, mouse, sound, Ethernet all work with it too.
Unfortunately for high priced premium products, the increase in quality of basic products forces premium products to be better or fail.
Related to your example - $1 burgers are increasingly better, than you would expect. The difference between McDonald's midrange line and, say, a burger at a restaurant for $18 is negligible in flavor. I can no longer justify going to a restaurant and pay $18+tip for a burger.
Sure, to you. There's a whole lot of not you out there for whom the distinction is worth the price differential. That's true in both hamburgers and hardware. Needs, goals, and use cases differ significantly among people.
I'd argue that the functional difference between a Honda Fit and a Tesla is less than the difference between the best McDonald's hamburger and an $18 hamburger. That's why I drive a Honda Fit. In the face of Tesla's increasing sales it would be pretty strange to assert that my taste was somehow universal.
I would argue a many, perhaps most, people that won't eat a McDonald's hamburger because of some perceived lack of quality probably haven't had one in many years and are instead working off public perceptions and status indicators about what they think it represents and must be like.
And then we've come full circle to Apple products.
I'm a classically trained chef who tends to specialize in bar food. I know more about the marketing, creation, and perception of food than you do— you're wrong.
McDonald's has very high quality preparation standards. Their ingredients and techniques were constructed to facilitate their high-speed, high-consistency process, but prevent them from incorporating things that the overwhelming majority of burger consumers prefer.
For example, the extremely fine grind on the meat, the thin patty, the sweet bread, the singular cheese selection, the inability to get the patty cooked to specification, the lack of hard sear or crust and the maillardization that accompanies it, etc. etc. etc. At a minimum, people prefer juicier burgers with coarser, more loosely-packed texture, usually cooked to lower temperatures (though this depends on what part of the country you're in,) and the flavor and texture differential from a hard sear, be it on a flat top or grill, and toasted bread.
For consumers who, at least at that moment, have a use case that requires their food be cheap, fast, and available, well we know who the clear winner is.
In my new career as a software developer and designer, I use apple products. I am willing to pay for the reliable UNIXy system that can also natively run industry-standards graphics tools without futzing around with VMs and things, and do all that on great hardware. There will always be people who aren't going to compare bits pushed to dollars spent and are going to be willing to spend the extra few hundred bucks on a device they spend many hours a day interacting with.
This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
> I know more about the marketing, creation, and perception of food than you do— you're wrong.
I don't doubt you know more about food. If you applied that knowledge to my actual point instead of what it appears you assumed my point was, this assertion might have been correct.
That's not entirely your fault, I was making a slightly different point than the exiting conversation was arguing, so it's easy to bring the context of that into what I was trying to say and assume they were more related than they were.
The belittling way in which you responded though, that's all on you.
> This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
My point, applied to this, would be to question what other products you've tried? My assertion is that people perceive other products to be maybe 50%-70% as good, when in reality they are probably closer to 85%-95% as good (if not better, in rare instances). That is a gap between perception and reality.
As applied to burgers, I was saying that people that refuse to eat at McDonald's because of quality probably have a very skewed perception of the actual differences in quality in a restaurant burger compared to a McDonald's burger.
I'm fully prepared to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time. I also don't see how anything you said really applies to my point, so I don't think you've really proven I'm wrong yet.
So you're creating metaphors that don't make sense using things that you have a limited understanding of to describe something you think you might be wrong about and getting annoyed that everybody else isn't following along with your deep conversational chess. Right then. I'm going to go ahead and opt out of this conversation.
Feel free. I simply made an observation that was loosely connected to the existing converaation and noted how it seemed to parallel something else.
I wasn't annoyed by you misunderstanding, I was annoyed by you misunderstanding, assuming you understood my position completely because it would more conveniently fit with your existing knowledge, and then using that assumed position to proclaim your superiority and my foolishness.
It's not about deep conversational chess on my part, it's about common decency and not assuming uncharitable positions of others by default on your part. A problem, I'll note, that you repeated in the last comment.
Just the mere perception of quality will increase your satisfaction levels. The perception of lack of quality will reduce you satisfaction levels.
Thus I still maintain that your "perfect" $18 burger is only marginally better than McDonald's midrange burger. The fact that you actually spend time on making that burger more appetising - is proof that the low cost foods are getting better and better.
While focusing on my analogy, you literally prove my overall point.
30 years ago you weren't necessary, as low cost food wasn't nearly as good as today. Now - you have to exist to justify that premium.
I think you're reading more into my comment than what I actually said, possible because of someone else's prior comment in this thread.
I was making a point less about McDonald's being equivalent to a restaurant burger and more about people's perceptions of McDonald's and how bad it is. That is, there's probably a lot less difference in the taste of those burgers than a lot of people want to admit.
The other aspect to consider is consistency. I had a $14 burger at a restaurant on Saturday that I would have been happy to swap in any single burger I've ordered from McDonald's in the last 12 months. You may not consider it high quality at McDonald's, but you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get.
All I'm really doing is making a point that there's a bit of fetishism about luxury items going on these days. Are Apple devices generally higher quality than many competitors? Yes. Is the difference in quality in line with most people's perception of the difference in quality? I don't think so.
I haven't had a McDonald's hamburger for many years. You are partly correct that it is because of my perception that it is trash. But when I walk by a McDonald's it doesn't smell like food to me anymore and smells more akin to garbage on a warm day.
> The difference between McDonald's midrange line and, say, a burger at a restaurant for $18 is negligible in flavor.
This may be the single worst analogy I've ever seen.
There is no amount of money you can pay at McDonalds to get a good quality burger.
I don't spend $18 for burgers, since there are a million places where you can pay $5-8 dollars and get a damned good piece of beef. But not at McDonalds.
If the employees are doing it right, it’s not “that bad” of a burger. So, just pay the employees enough to actually care about the burger and it comes out decent.
I’ve eaten at McDonald’s around the world, it really depends but they do have good burgers when they’re cooked right.
It's not the employees. In different countries the entire recipe and production system is different. In many non-US countries, McDonald's is a more upscale "foreign" restaurant and far more expensive than in the US.
90% of these Mac silicon investments would directly benefit their iPhone cash cow—perhaps not this cycle, but certainly in the chips they'll put in future iPhones.
And the remaining 10% would indirectly benefit benefit their iPhone cash cow in the form of keeping people inside the ecosystem.
The Mac silicon is inheriting the investments Apple made in the iPhone CPUs. This will continue. The bits which Apple invests to make their existing hardware scale to desktop and high end laptops won't benefit the iPhone much at all. On future generation chips, Apple will spread the development costs over a few more units, but since iPhone + iPad ship several times more units than the Mac, the bulk of the costs will be born by them.
Indeed, apples G4 cube debuted at 1800 base in 2000. That’s the same ballpark as their iMac now and their Mac mini starts at about half that. Meanwhile inflation would have made that G4 ~2700 today.
Silvers gone up. Golds gone up. Probably various fixed costs had to be further invested in the form of contracts with fabs or new fabs built. Etc. But really the Mac mini is more of a modern likeness to the G4 cube which retails now for a 800$ start, less than half the g4 cubes starting price.
Edit-they also went from being a company with around 8500 employees in 2000 to 137000 today. Surely every part of their organization chart has contributed toward pressures to otherwise push up their prices to maintain revenue.
Since Silver and Gold are priced in $USD their price is influenced by the actions of the US government. One of those driving forces is the current US monetary policies (i.e. an growing budget deficit).
Another factor is perceived risk. Since the markets are always worrying about the current US China trade talks, that uncertainty helps gold and silver as they are seen as safe havens.
This is exactly what Apple has done with all of their products over the 30+ years. The iPad is a perfect example of Apple doing both over the past 10 years. Likewise the iPhone SE & the Apple Watch. It's done it with every product in their portfolio.
Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less.
Shareholders benefit from increased market share just as much as they do from increasing margins, arguably more. The base iPad and the iPhone SE both "cannibalize" their higher end products, but significantly expand their base. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a $800 MacBook enter their lineup shipping with the same CPU as the iPad.