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What is the cost (for Apple) in straight up R&D dollars of building a new model of Mac? And how much does it cost them to tool up for manufacturing and create the logistic chain to put it in customers' hands? Remember that Apple aims to sell a vertically integrated stack, all the way from their own cases, motherboards, and PSUs up through the OS and core apps. The point of this is to deliver a specific user experience that they control, and also to keep competitors out of their pool (they allowed licensed Mac clones circa 1994-96 and it didn't end well). While they still buy in CPUs from Intel and other components (RAM, video chipsets, SSDs, hard drives) from other suppliers, these are generally low-level components -- as low level as Apple can get -- and even then they're trying to build self-owned stacks so they're not dependent on anyone else (e.g. the A-series processors in the iPhone and iPad) -- a lesson they learned the hard way thanks to Motorola with the 68K and subsequently PowerPC architecture. (I'm guessing Tim Cook personally has bad memories of the failure to deliver a mobile G5 back in the day.) Anyway ... Developing a new machine from the ground up has got to cost in the tens of millions, at least. (Look at the sunk costs that went into the new Mac Pro, for example.) Are there enough "enthusiast" customers with system-building interests out there to make such a beast net-profitable, after taking into account the brand dilution implication of stacking up too many SKUs (as they did in the Bad Old Days of the first half of the 1990s, before the Return of Jobs)? I'm guessing they've done the calculation and concluded the answer is "no", at least for the time being. |
The only people excited about the new Mac Pro are people already locked into the Apple ecosystem. It is a fundamentally backwards looking product that attempts to squeeze more money out of already captured customers. It is not likely to attract new customers to the Apple ecosystem.