That's likely a large part of it, but there may also be a side dish of "We expect to make more money on the Mac Studio, so we're gonna release that first before we let the Mini cannibalize Mac Studio sales." Might be enough room in the market for both, but it just makes sense to put your engineering resources toward the thing you expect to have a higher margin first, then fill in the gaps.
"The missing mid-range desktop Mac"
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That's likely a large part of it, but there may also be a side dish of "We expect to make more money on the Mac Studio, so we're gonna release that first before we let the Mini cannibalize Mac Studio sales." Might be enough room in the market for both, but it just makes sense to put your engineering resources toward the thing you expect to have a higher margin first, then fill in the gaps.
This seems pretty straightforward, but I'm gonna pull on that thread a bit.
I look at what's in front of me, I see this:
Let's not let the laptop screen go to waste!
This is the problem: While I admit my second image has a bit of exaggeration for effect[0], even "don't let the laptop screen go to waste", which seems straightforward, ain't universal.
[0[ Fair disclosure on the exaggeration: I have a workflow once every 4 months or so where I use the laptop screen as well, so I can, and do, just move the keyboard over a bit. Moving the keyboard over just that little bit and craning my neck to the left often because that's where the bulk of the screens are leaves enough of a crick in the neck that I'm glad I only do that for a week every four months. Most of the time, my keyboard and mouse slide on my desk to be in front of whatever area of the screens I'm currently most closely working with, which I can't do if the laptop's open and blocking the area.
That wouldn't surprise me. My wife, who is also an IT professional, wants one screen on the machine. She wants it bigger, but she wants just one.
I don't understand it-- my desk has at various times in my life been mistaken for Cypher's workstation on the Nebuchadnezzar, and the fact that my daily driver's down to just two is something of an anomaly-- but I live with proof that those weirdos exist.
It's been working for them so far...
This is the problem with the iPhone Pro and the MacBook Pro: They devalue the meaning of the word "Pro."
For most jobs that might need that kind of hardware, that kind of hardware isn't even luxury-- it's just affordable. $5K is a lot for my toy desktop computer's monitor, but for work that actually needs that level of device, it's basically nothing.
Their billion dollar market cap appears to disagree with you on those points.
Now that Apple's mostly migrated away from Intel... is that still true? I would have agreed with you back in the Intel days-- as a rule, if you spec'd out an Intel Windows machine to match a Mac, you were going to be in the same ballpark. But now that we're not in the Intel world... is that still true?
Most of the Windows ARM space, right now, is convertible tablets and Chromebooks that someone tried to wedge Windows onto. Sure, we could compare those to a MacBook Air and come up with the same "Macs are soooooo expensive!", just like folks did when they were comparing the latest Celeron-powered flimsy plastic garbage with a pixels-the-size-of-golf-balls screen to the lowest-end Mac in the past.
But we can do better than that: A few actual get-work-done close-to-comparable ARM-based Windows laptops are finally announced and one is even shipping: The HP Elite Folio. It starts around $2,000, so let's compare it with a 14" MacBook Pro, because it's the same price:
The HP's Snapdragon 8C CPU can't hang with an M1, let alone the M1 Pro. And its GPU is even worse.
The HP's base storage is 256GB, half what the Apple MBP ships with.
The HP's base RAM is 8GB, half what the Apple ships for the same price.
The HP's screen is a 1920x1280 13.5" unit, compared with the 14.2" 3024x1964 Retina display in the Apple. (to be fair: The HP's got a touchscreen.)
I can pick up that base 14" Apple today; the HP would get to me sometime in June.
Looking at the storage and the RAM, apparently I should have compared the HP Elite Folio to an M1 MacBook Air... which may start at the same RAM and storage figures as the HP, but the MacBook Air still isn't hobbled by a Snapdragon, and has a Retina display. And the MBA sells for half the price of the HP.
So, no... Macs right now aren't priced similar to comparable Windows machines. Macs are cheaper.
...except those aren't anywhere near comparable. If I want similar performance to an M1-powered Mac, but with an Intel or AMD processor, I have to choose between constantly looking for power taps or scheduling regular chiropractic adjustments. I chose the HP Folio because it's at least trying to play in the same market.
Comparing a modern Mac to a mass-market Windows machine would be making all the same mistakes that folks made when they tried to compare low-end Windows machines to Macs to claim that Macs are more expensive.
Right now, you're absolutely right: Windows on ARM _for real_ (read: not a Chromebook with the wrong OS) is low-volume-- but that's exactly my point. That's why, right now, Macs are cheaper than comparable Windows machines.
As Dell and Lenovo finally get their ARMs out the door (and probably another generation or two of SoCs roll out the door at Qualcomm), we'll absolutely see some big differences, and my guess is we'll get back to the world we've always been in-- you'll have more options in the Windows world, and for a given _task_, Windows may be cheaper than Mac again, because there are a number of spaces Apple just doesn't play in. I expect that for a given level of hardware, they'll once again be in the same ballpark.
Indeed-- just driving the displays is no trouble at all-- where my Thighroaster 16" spun up to leaf-blower mode just by firing up Zoom, I occasionally do that while driving two 4K monitors, the built-in, and AirPlay to a 4K AppleTV-powered display from my 14" MBP and TG Pro still claims "Fans Off".
I can get the fans to spin up, but it takes heavier GPU load than that-- firing up Civilization 6 in a Windows 11 Parallels window will do it, and after a few more minutes the fans get fast enough I can actually hear them... but even at 4500rpm or so, the machine fans have never been as loud as idling my Thighroaster 16" was.
No, I'm looking at three. That's why I brought up the power taps and the chiropractic adjustments. The Elite Folio uses a related processor technology and gets the other two axes fairly close.
You make a good argument, though, that technology similarity may not be as important as the fact that Windows for ARM isn't as well supported as it is on x86. Would the result be similar if we ignore "related processor technology"? I don't know, but you're gonna make me find out.
That happens all the time. It's literally why people buy $500 Windows laptops. Some of them even have problems that can be solved on a $500 laptop just fine (more and more as technology marches on!), and they're even happy doing it.
OK, let's pull on that thread. Let's play the x86 version of this game, and use your example: The Elitebooks are actually Mobile Ryzen parts, not AMD's APUs-- the 5700GE APU would be faster and more comparable with an M1 (not Pro, not Max) in performance, but they're 35-watt parts, so they don't go in small, light, battery efficient laptops.
The Ryzen 6000 parts look like they'll beat a base M1 in every category once they're shipping. They're not, though, so let's compare a Ryzen 5850U-powered EliteBook 835 (the most recent one HP's shipped). And you said MacBook Pro, so we'll compare with the 13" version that can have a base M1 under the hood and all the cooling it needs to keep the performance steady.
- Both have 13" screens.
- The MacBook Pro has better CPU performance-- geekbench shows single core scores around 1700 versus 1400, and multicore around 7600 vs 6700. If you're willing to run Linux on the HP, its multicore performance starts to hang with the Mac, and in a couple cases, even beats it.
- The MacBook Pro is slightly heavier, 3.0 lbs versus 2.8 lbs.
- The Elitebook 835 G8 actually starts with 16 GB of memory and 512GB of storage, compared with the MacBook Pro's 16GB and 256GB. That's also a win for the Elitebook! (Sort of. The Elitebook also ends at 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage...)
- I can't find anywhere where the same tests are done on both machines, but the MBP can get up to 20 hours of "video playback" battery life and HP claims up to 24 hours of battery life (no description of what you're doing). So OK, that's also a win for the Elitebook.
- The 13" screen on the Elitebook is 1080p, not Retina. Advantage to Apple here.
(As an aside at this point: you noted that I made a huge exaggeration about constantly looking for power taps. These are marketing numbers, so they need to be taken with a grain of salt, but they suggest I wasn't exaggerating-- I was flat wrong. My apologies.)
Anyhow, we can spend a few bucks and bump the Apple SSD size up to the Elitebook's levels. The Apple is a bit faster, but its main advantage is that it has a significantly better screen. The HP brings better battery life and weight, but its significant advantage is it has no goddamn touchbar. They really are, as you suggest, reasonably closely matched.
So let's look at pricing: The Elitebook costs $2059. The Macbook Pro, even after paying for Apple's ridiculously priced SSD upgrades to match the Elitebook, is $1399.
What's this? Even if we play by your rules, the Mac is still cheaper? By over six hundred bucks?!
Might be worth it to get rid of the touchbar.
Part of the problem with the comparison right now is that those Ryzens appear to be hard to get your hands on-- HP advertises that Elitebook at $2,000, but they also have their Probook 635 for a much more competitive price... if you're willing to wait 'til August for the thing to ship. Lenovo doesn't appear to even offer a Ryzen 7 Mobile powered machine right now (might have missed one), Acer's has no "configure to order" so even though they're cheap, you're stuck with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, assuming the vendors who sell them still have any stock at all.
That Elitebook turned out to be a very similar device in some non-technological ways, too-- you can actually buy the damn thing! Unsurprisingly, when HP has the option, they're putting the processors they can get their hands on in the expensive models....
We're currently in a world where we've got COVID-affected logistics crises and other processor vendors are still catching up now that they've been served notice about performance-per-watt. I think once we get back to the regular world that things will level back out like they usually have, where a given level of technology costs the same-ish from Apple as it does from anyone else, and everyone will claim Apples are expensive because they simply don't play in low-end markets.
Right now, it's really kinda a nuts world, and it's been playing quite nicely in Apple's favor. Wonder if anyone will notice before the world gets back to usual.
That's a thing I think a lot of folks still don't get: When I choose, say, "looks like 2560x1440", it's not sending a 2560x1440 image to the monitor. If my monitor's a 5K monitor, the Mac is sending a 5K image to the monitor. If I'm, say, editing a 4K video, that 4K video can show up on my screen using 3840x2160 pixels-- one-for-one native resolution-- leaving 1280 pixels in width and 720 pixels in height leftover for an L-shaped area for my editing controls. Those controls are what are sized as if they were on a 2560x1440 screen.
It's not just smoothing out a 2560x1440 image. You can do that on anything!
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