"The missing mid-range desktop Mac"

[Robaba]

I believe (without any evidence mind you) that the Mini will hold on to the previous generation Apple silicon, including Pro and Max SoCs beyond the M2. It will have to make do with a cheaper-to-manufacture case as the current cast and machined aluminum, even as old as it is, just can’t bring the price down where they want it.

 

[Robaba]

“I want 32gb, multiple monitors with me Pro/Max, but not pay 2k”. Well okay, there’s no mini M1 Pro + 32gb for ~$1650 available (let’s assume it would be $200 and $250 for the processor and ram upgrade respectively if offered), but it’s only 15-20% from that missing machine to the Studio.

It's not at all obvious what Apple would charge for an M1 Pro Mini.

On the MacBook Pro, it's $500 to upgrade from the base M1 Pro to the M1 Max and $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB of RAM. That seems pretty consistent, that the difference between a similarly-configured 14-inch MacBook and Studio will be $900.

So if we're subtracting from the base Studio, the Mini should be no more than $1,100 for a 16GB M1 Pro configuration. That would only be a $200 increase from the current higher-end M1 Mini, though, which is what Apple charges for the jump from 8GB to 16GB on its own. So that's right out.

I think most of the apparent hole in the lineup is just the memory limitation and hopefully the M2 fixes that. Being able to upgrade a Mini to 32GB for under $1500 will serve a lot of users, even if it doesn't have a "Pro" chip in it.

This is why I feel the mini redesign is about reducing cost. The mini needs to drop in price or it creates price disparities in the lineup that act as a disincentive to mini ownership.

 

[Robaba]

What is astounding is just how bad the Precision is in the details. The biggest PC manufacturer using the processor from the oldest Processor manufacturer using the most supported OS in the world...and it can't sleep.

That's not exclusive to Wintel. Apple's stuff is just as bad in various ways. And possibly I'm mistaken because I don't use Windows much, but it seems to me that at least Microsoft's software is less buggy than Apple's. Not that it works better, but at least it's working poorly as designed rather than because of bugs.

Apple attacked computing from the bottom up (how do we get our phone processor to scale) precisely BECAUSE what Intel was producing had a TON of technical debt it couldn't scale past, and a power budget that was horrific.

Actually as I was reading the earlier part of your post I was thinking the same thing about software, both on the Windows and Mac sides: it's just decades of layers upon layers of complexity. And either those layers are not actively developed so their bugs don't get fixed, or they are (somewhat) actively developed so new bugs creep in.

Would be nice to realize that personal computer OSes are no longer something that makes money for anyone, and come up with a clean new standard one that will run on all personal computers (as opposed to the mobile/tablet and servers stuff) and then the hardware and application software makers have something stable to target.

Both Apple and Microsoft have tried that (clean room os’s) but have failed spectacularly due to the need for backward compatibility. The closest Apple got to a successful “new” os was iOS, but that’s really just a stripped down MacOS (NeXT). But frankly it’s all a fools errand, since whatever os you come up with will have to evolve over time, it will invariably collect cruft. It’s entropy in reverse.