[ljm]

What incentive would Apple have to do that? For the most part their products have only gone up in price (as with the yearly iPhone releases). I'd expect exactly the opposite instead (e.g. thinner-bezel macbooks with face ID). A cheaper ARM Macbook would cannibalise their iPad sales.

Laptops with OS freedom have always been a more niche thing, same as dual booting on a desktop machine. Short of selling laptops with no OS at all, most people are going to stick with the default install.

[dev_tty01]

>their products have only gone up in price (as with the yearly iPhone releases)

Hmm, not sure I agree with that. The iPhone 12 mini base price is $699 with 64GB. iPhone 3GS in 2009 with 8 GB was $599, or $727 in inflation adjusted 2020 dollars. Never mind the incredible increases in data rate, speed, display quality, and other capabilities.

Or, take the iPhone SE, an incredible phone compared to the 3GS and it has a base price of $399 with 64GB. 200 dollars less before inflation.

Apple has introduced premium models at higher prices but that leads to an incorrect comparison. It's just not reasonable to point to a 2009 iPhone and a 2020 iPhone Pro and suggest some sort of relevant price comparison.

In actual or inflation adjusted dollars it costs much less to own an iPhone today than it did a decade ago and you get a lot more phone.

I agree that we shouldn't expect a cheaper laptop, but I don't think it is because they care about cannibalizing their own sales. They set margin goals for each product and have demonstrated an unwillingness to discount below those goals solely to pursue market share.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

[dzhiurgis]

Kinda, if you compare small screen price, which is kinda fair.

Yet look what competition is able to do with $300 budget - 5G, 120 fps screens (although lesser quality), similar (or better) cameras, similar performance, bigger batteries (similar life tho).

[tatersolid]

> Yet look what competition is able to do with $300 budget

And few or no software updates or patches, and full abandonment of a device after at most two years of support.

Meanwhile my kids have hand-me-down iPhone 6s models that are working well, running the latest, fully-patched software after five years of service.

There’s a lot of value in an iPhone besides the hardware specs.

[sgerenser]

At $300 the manufacturer has to make serious trade offs. I’m sure there are models at that price point with great cameras, or 120hz, or 5g, or longer battery life (actual size of the battery is irrelevant, battery life is the important metric). Is there a model with all of those features at $300? I’m not aware of one. Especially performance, since most Android phones can’t beat the 2 year old iPhone XS.

[actuator]

> A cheaper ARM Macbook would cannibalise their iPad sales.

I was thinking of it more like. Here's your PC in tablet form for iPad, here's your PC in laptop form for a entry level Macbook. They can keep the internals same for both. Most users are fine with web browser, mail client, photo editor etc. which an iPad internal laptop should very well run.

> Laptops with OS freedom have always been a more niche thing, same as dual booting on a desktop machine. Short of selling laptops with no OS at all, most people are going to stick with the default install.

True, but everything being x86 or x86_64 allowed us to run other OSs and that community kept the threat of a different OS alive for other users. If no one can run other software on these laptops, that fear will go away completely.