thadec

mikethemartian said:

They just reported iPad revenue above Mac revenue.

That isn't unusual. Prior to the switch to Apple Silicon, which caused a lot of people to upgrade faster than normal, Apple often sold less than 20 million Macs a year, and most of those were the entry level models - Core i3 MacBook Air, Core i3 Mac Mini, 13" MacBook Pro and all generally with minimum RAM and storage - meaning that Apple was usually making as much or more money on the 50 million iPads sold a year. The $329 iPad uses outdated/leftover components, giving it a decent margin. The iPad Air (which uses "newer but not the newest" components so margin is still good) costs $500 and the iPad Pro - which sells a ton - starts at $800, which is more than the Mac Mini and only $200 less than the MBA. By contrast, the Macs all have the latest components. Even the new $600 Mac Mini in the 14 year old box has the latest chip and SSD. The MacBooks have that plus redesigned exteriors, which include a keyboard, trackpad and larger screen. (Yes, the iPads have touchscreens. But they also get those in bulk from Samsung who charges "mobile component" prices for them, not PC component prices.) 

While the tablet boom that was caused by the pandemic will end, sending iPad sales back to normal, once the newness factor of Apple Silicon dies down, Mac sales are also going to go from the near 30 million the past 2 years and revert to the mean of about 18 to 22 million a year.

We believe there is nothing that makes the Studio Display stand out from the competition. 

This isn't my area, but doesn't the Studio Display run iOS? Then that means that it is far more likely to receive future updates that are relevant to the Apple ecosystem than are Samsung and LG monitors. Just my 2%. 

Keeping the same design - which is perfectly fine by the way - allowed them to drop the price from $700 to $600 which is absolutely huge, because $600 is basically the starting point for good Intel and AMD general productivity desktops (12th gen and 13th gen Intel Core i5 and their AMD equivalents). There is actually no reason to buy an Intel Inspiron or HP Envy now unless you need x86 software (which to be fair includes a lot of us). Of course, if you need more than 8GB RAM then that is totally different: a 16 GB DDR5 RAM stick costs $50 on sale, which makes a $600 8 GB RAM desktop PC ... a $650 24 GB RAM one. 

The Mac Mini is now the best deal in computing by a mile. Giving that up just to be able to say that you put it in something the size of an Apple TV makes no sense. 

keithw said:

Not to be ungrateful, but where are the Mac Studio updates with the M2 Pro, Max and Ultra options?

Dude, what is up with you? I am not even an Apple guy - as you can probably tell from my comment history, my job is to be a contrarian when applicable - but why would you even expect an annual upgrade cycle from a company that makes the chips, OS and computers themselves? 

You get annual updates with Dell and HP workstations because they only have to make the PC.
They get the chips from Intel and AMD which are refreshed annually.
They get the OS from Microsoft (and for workstations the various entities that provide the Linux distros).
They only have to take those parts and use them to build "new" computers that rarely meaningfully change from year to year ... they just need to swap out last year's Intel/AMD CPU with this year's and keep everything else the same. I still remember the freakout that Intel caused when they stated that 12th gen and higher wasn't going to be backwards compatible with most older motherboards (even if you could get it to work it wouldn't be supported or covered by warranty). 
That the PC manufacturers get everything else supplied to them that they only have to use to make - or more accurately have Foxconn and other white box types make for them - the PCs practically eliminates the R&D and manufacturing costs that Apple has to cover by themselves. That means that it makes no financial sense for Apple to refresh their Macs every year like they do their smartphones. 

Another thing that makes refreshing smartphones each year sensible? That Apple sells hundreds of millions of them each year. Note that Apple TV, which sells in far lower volumes, gets refreshed much less frequently. Same deal with Macs. Apple sells 30 million Macs in a great year, 25 million in a good year, 20 million in a normal one. That means that the market for any annually refreshed device but the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro - their biggest sellers, and even that is only the entry level MBA and the 13" and 14" MBP - won't be big enough to sustain it profitably. This is not like PCs, which outsells Macs by a factor of 10, meaning that there will always be a decent number of people looking for a new HP or Acer in any given year. 

The Mac Studio is a $2000 device that only makes sense for video and photo editors and musicians. For literally everyone else it is a terrible product because you can either get similar performance for way less than $2000 or a lot more performance for that $2000. Yes, that AMD Threadripper or Intel Core i9 workstation will be a lot bigger, noisier and draw a lot more power but it will do everything that doesn't need the prores codecs - again everything but photo, video and music stuff - faster and cheaper. To expect Apple to upgrade it any more often than every 2 years makes no sense. At least if it gets upgraded in 2023 then it will be a major upgrade from a 5nm M1 Ultra to a 3nm M3 Ultra. Merely going from a 5nm M1 to a 4nm M2 is lame. It only made sense to do it for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air and 13" MacBook Pro because they were still on the original 2020 M1, not the improved M1 that came out in 2021. 

The price dropped to $599? That is last-generation Intel NUC ripoff mini-PC territory. Or the price of an Intel Core i3 Chromebook with 8 GB RAM (before it inevitably goes on sale). That is a HUGE story! Why aren't more people talking about this?