First, routers and displays are a red herring. Apple stopped selling routers because it didn't want to spend its focus engineering a mesh product and mesh was taking over. (And its value add was shrinking--other makers' products became steadily more stable and reliable.) Apple stopped selling displays because it had no way to add the value needed to maintain its margins, something that is likely changing as the consumer monitor market has stagnated for five years and Apple has developed more ability to source custom components.
I think they stopped making routers because, more and more, Internet providers were locking customers into their combo modem+router boxes. Homes with single function cable modems were disappearing. That shrank the market for their wireless router and wireless router+Time Machine combo box, and they just dropped it. I think they could have held on and veered into a NAS+router+backup solution: just plug the Ethernet cable into the cable/fiber modem, and let the Apple magic happen with devices automatically connecting, automatically backed up, etc. I'm not sure you can turn off the wireless router function in my fiber modem without deeper research. That it was not easily done convinces me that Internet providers have the wireless router market locked up.
I don't think the consumer mesh networking unit sales are all that big. It by definition will be smaller than the shrinking home WiFi router market. Big for office buildings, but that's not Apple's wheelhouse either.
For displays, see below.
Second, within the Mac lineup, the notebook and desktop pictures were different. Ive got the notebooks mostly right, as much wailing and gnashing of teeth as everyone will subject me to for that statement. He just overshot a bit on thinness and didn't manage to execute on the butterfly keyboard. The 2021 MBP doesn't look like a 2008 or 2011 MBP redux. It looks like a 2016 MBP that had a slight course correction and was hit by an ugly stick. The market, including the pro market, really did move away from the desktop replacement and toward thin-and-light with battery life prioritized over all-out performance, even at the pro end. He got the trend right but the details wrong.
Yes, I agree with you here. Apple got where the PC market was going and the laptop takeover of the PC market was going to continue apace. A lot of this is hindsight is 20/20. Predicting where a market goes is really hard, and you won't get the details right, but Apple has more resources and data than us arm-chair quarterbacks. They should be more right than we think.
Not selling an Apple branded monitor, especially a TB3 monitor, was a mistake. People were buying laptops to replace their desktops, but they were still using those laptops on their desks, in the office and at home. I think this increased the market for monitors as a laptop meant you could have a monitor at your desk and at your home. The pandemic only increased the need for a large monitor at home.
The 4th gen MBP models with TB3 were finally at a point where "a single cable plugged in and everything lights up, including charging of the laptop" became achievable. This should have meant they should have had more branded monitors for sale, not none, as there was more opportunity to use external displays. There is even a market for mobile monitors. They really should have 24", 27", 32" and 35" 21:9 monitors as part of their lineup.
The desktop is where Ive really screwed up, and I have some sympathy there. The fact that in this era of unprecedented performance per watt the high-end desktop space is moving quickly toward workstations that require a 20A outlet is batshit insane. I wouldn't have designed for it either, in either 2012 or 2016. It's purely an artifact of both Intel and NVIDIA being pushed into corners as a result of their own choices, and it's resulting in some wacky products in the workstation market.
Apple capitulated to it with the 2019 Mac Pro. But Apple also made clear through both pricing and component choices that it thought such a product would be appealing only to a small audience, and that the bulk of professionals buying Macs would find other products more to their liking. The 2021 MBP, as much as I make fun of its looks, is an astonishingly capable pro computer that is cheaper, much easier to deploy, and in many ways more refined than the Mac Pro. We are in an iMac interregnum but the same could have been said of both the 2017 iMac Pro and the 2020 27" iMac when they came out. And the same will be true of the Mac Studio. The high end of the desktop market is a place where Apple has judged it necessary to play, but Apple is also making clear that it thinks the buyers who don't really really need to be there should be elsewhere.
Yeah, an Alder Lake CPU peaking at 300 W or an Nvidia RTX 3090 whatever needing 450 W is pretty crazy, and both wattage numbers are going up for future chips. This really is not an excuse for Apple not playing in the desktop market.
They finally realized that the hardware is in service of an ecosystem or a platform. Not serving enough niches with the platform will erode sales as software becomes less and less available. They need to play in at least one high end niche so that they can sell MBP and large iMac models. Preferably they should play in most of the niches. It doesn't stop. They really do need to continue play the game of stuffing as much performance as possible into a 1500 W machine.
Intel, AMD and Nvidia, others, aren't going to stop. They will go right to the line where it becomes impossible to cool and limited by 15A to 20A circuits in homes and offices. The crypto nuts will go right along and use 30A to 40A circuits at home as long as proof-of-work rigs make them money. It's only a small subset of folks who will value the Watts saved. If Apple's machine uses 500 W and an x86 machine matches its performance at 1000 W, not many will swayed at the 2x difference in Watt. If a 1000 W Apple Silicon machine outperforms a 1000 W x86 machine by 2x, people will notice, and probably be swayed.
