I was really impressed with Apple offering reasonably priced hardware of late, like the Neo. Now I see why. They're transitionaing away from the making money off of hardware phase, and into the making money off of you phase.
Another factor might be that Apple knows that its days are numbered when it comes to charging giant premiums over Windows and Android hardware and getting away with it because of its purportedly superior ease of use.
If you are of the generation that grew up with a smartphone, Windows and Mac are no different vis-a-vis the learning curve. You will need to learn how to use filesystems, learn window management and install desktop applications on both. And let's face it, that generation is using Gmail and Google Docs that are identical across platforms. The difference isn't worth handing Apple a huge chunk of cash to upgrade to 16GB RAM.
I think for a long time Apple could grow by introducing new hardware categories, growing the average spend on hardware (by e.g. moving from upgradable to soldered memory/disks), and additional services.
It has been a while since they introduced category-changing new devices and people hold on to their iPhones/iPads/Apple Watches longer due to smaller changes between generations and long software support periods.
So, the primary way that they see how they could grow is by introducing more ads and more subscriptions. Slowly they make Apple's platforms more gross:
- When searching in the app store, nearly half the page is ads now.
- Pushing F1 movie advertisements through Apple Wallet.
- Ads in maps.
- Pushing subscriptions by putting ads for Apple Creator Studio in iWork apps (Pages, Keynote, Numbers).
- Pushing subscriptions by putting Apple Fitness+ ads in the system setting on iOS (!).
This might work for a while, but eventually, Apple will lose a key differentiator.
For as cursed as our timeline is, "Linux desktop is solid, LLMs exempt you from the fiddly bits, and valve fixed gaming" was not on my bingo card 10 years ago, but hot damn, we just might be okay.