[jskajakzkjx]

Somebody once said that that Apple’s business model is charging a very high markup for flash memory (currently it’s $50 per 64 GB to upgrade storage on an iPhone or MacBook). The margin on other parts is also high. The user-upgradeable Mac Pro provides an escape hatch from these expensive upgrades. Therefore the entry price has to be much higher to make up for it. An affordable tower would cannibalize Mac Pro sales by providing businesses with a cost-saving opportunity that’s too good to refuse.

[randall]

This is good analysis, but there's some other effect I'm unable to put my finger on.

The iPad is at least an order of magnitude better than comparable netbooks (though chromebooks, depending on manufacturer, can be competitive thanks mainly to ChromeOS's reduced footprint). So even though the margins are high, the perceived quality, regardless of raw benchmarks, is still something. It's not just marketing to me to say the marriage of software and hardware is unique. (Gruber's observation about NSObject alloc's being a lot faster on Apple Silicon, for instance).

Now that I think about it, honestly Google is the only other company playing by these rules... ie pixelbook, pixel phone, etc. But they're much earlier in the evolution, and have less upstream control in software (especially since Fuchsia seems to be somewhat lower priority than before, though this is second hand knowledge).

[saagarjha]

Adjust reference counts on an NSObject, allocating one is mostly just a calloc ;)

[oneplane]

That somebody is probable only partially right about a partial business unit within Apple. People tend to buy it for the package deal, not for individual specs. At volume, those are the much more valuable customers than the 'buy a single computer' crowd that often talk about their modifications they want to make.

[EricE]

Exactly - Apple "sells" experience, not parts or specs.

[sgt101]

One does not simply create a $2trn business by selling flash memory.