[chongli]

lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option

From Apple's perspective, that's a machine with razor-thin margins. Why would they want to sell that when all of their other products have enviable margins?

Moreover, such a machine would cannibalize their high-end Mac Pro sales. After all the money they spent to develop it, having your pro customers scoop up the thin margin gaming machines seems like a poor strategy.

[rleigh]

I'm unconvinced that it would cannibalise Mac Pro sales. The Mac Pro is so unnecessarily expensive that it has to exclude all but the richest companies and individuals. It's for people who have money to blow on £600 novelty chrome wheels as an afterthought. Apple have clearly noticed that there's a market for people with more money than sense, but it's a small niche.

The market for mid- to high-end desktops is indeed lower margin, but it's a much bigger market overall. The old Mac Pro was at the high end of this market. Expensive, but justifiable if you needed it. If Apple had the will, they could be profitable in this space. They have chosen to exclude themselves from it.

Back in the mid '00s, I saw Mac Pros in use in scientific research settings, because they allowed use of lots of RAM compared to equivalent PC mainboards of the time, could take lots of storage, and had lots of horsepower to throw at bioinformatics and modelling problems. We had compute clusters as well, but for some problems these were a better fit. Today, Macs are banned. The academic funding bodies don't consider them good value for money. And they are not wrong in that assessment.