It wouldn't be fully compatible with the Thunderbolt display and no target mode. The Air is their biggest selling machine, I imagine they'd want to maintain that functionality.
1) How many people buying MBAs are hooking them up to $1000+ Apple display?
They made $6b in accessory sales in 2014, which should include about 8-10m $99 Apple TVs and a bunch of $99-199 Airport routers. Say it's $4b for the $999 displays, that's about 4m units between 18.9m Macs. I'd expect them to make up a good portion of the sales considering 75% of all Mac sales are laptops and most are Airs.
2) Why can't it have the mDP port and output to the display as DP?
None of the ports would work on the display.
One possibility is that they are making an entry-level Retina model based on ARM to take on Chromebooks that only has a single USB port. If they bring in an Intel Retina model at $999 with Thunderbolt and magsafe, the ARM model could probably undercut it by about $200-300.
That would be a confusing model to consumers though, it would need completely different branding from the Macbook Air. Apple would build all their own software for it like Mail, Safari, Finder, Pages, Garageband, FCPX, iTunes, xCode etc. but 3rd party apps like Office, Adobe apps and so on would have to be rewritten or maybe run in some binary compatibility mode. It would certainly cover basic use and would be a good option for students. It might even be able to run the iOS simulator in hardware instead of software mode.
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They made $6b in accessory sales in 2014, which should include about 8-10m $99 Apple TVs and a bunch of $99-199 Airport routers. Say it's $4b for the $999 displays, that's about 4m units between 18.9m Macs. I'd expect them to make up a good portion of the sales considering 75% of all Mac sales are laptops and most are Airs.
None of the ports would work on the display.
One possibility is that they are making an entry-level Retina model based on ARM to take on Chromebooks that only has a single USB port. If they bring in an Intel Retina model at $999 with Thunderbolt and magsafe, the ARM model could probably undercut it by about $200-300.
That would be a confusing model to consumers though, it would need completely different branding from the Macbook Air. Apple would build all their own software for it like Mail, Safari, Finder, Pages, Garageband, FCPX, iTunes, xCode etc. but 3rd party apps like Office, Adobe apps and so on would have to be rewritten or maybe run in some binary compatibility mode. It would certainly cover basic use and would be a good option for students. It might even be able to run the iOS simulator in hardware instead of software mode.