[ruralfam]

Not disagreeing re: vision for quality software and new products. However this segmentation is pretty good. Most everyone buying a Macbook today wants "M" performance. Most everyone who does not care about "benchmarks" and is price sensitive (likely a surprisingly large number of folks), is put off by MB pricing. So you gimp the processor, lower the price, take a bit of a margin hit on net profit for hware, but capture lots of sales and canabalize virtually no "M" sales. Plus I would guess the Apple has done enough market analysis to understand that the folks buying this new Macbook are likely to want to subscribe to something Apple offers which will offset the lower hware margin.

[epolanski]

"Most everyone" is pointless anecdotal talk. Most of the people I know have a mbp cuz their company buys it and they couldn't care less about a powerful computer if it wasn't for working or gaming (but that's not Apple's turf anyway).