jdiamond

Hey guys and gals, the $3,000 price point has been the top Apple laptop price for many years before the over $5k 15".  The 17" was around that price in 2011, so bring that price point forward and the 16" starting price is not that unreasonable. It will  probably be closer to $6k or $7k when fleshed out with max memory and SSD.  I upgraded the 17" to more memory than Apple offered at the time and it now has two SSDs inside that are 1TB or larger. Still a viable machine for work but not so much fun to carry in a shoulder bag.

Up until around 2017, $3,000 could always buy the top of the line maxed out Macbook Pro (ENDING PRICE), and that's what I always did, every single generation.  Now, in the era where a maxed out Macbook Pro costs $7,000 (which happened in a single year, up from $4,000 the year before, and $3,000 the year before that), for the first time ever, instead of just saying "give me the best one you can make", I have to go over every option and say "what's the lowest level I could live with?" - all trying to keep my end price under $4,000.  Even if you only need a 2TB hard drive, it's still hard to get it under $5K these days.   Since this price jump happened WAAAYYYY faster than inflation, I think it's fair game to gripe about it.  Remember how Tim Cook is no longer revealing unit sales, just revenue?  I'm afraid he's doing the economist thing, like "we get the most profit when we sell 1/4 the units at 5x the price".  The pitfall here is that the Mac platform is more valuable the more people use it.  Look at Adobe - it took 5 years, but they are finally starting to feel some serious business impacts from the "maximize revenue" route.