sevenfeet

Actually PCI 4.0 has been available in chipsets for a while.  But it has largely been ignored in the gamer/prosumer/pro desktop market since PCI 5.0 was supposed to be right around the corner (it's also been ignored by the biggest use driver, graphics cards).  PCI 4.0 is in some large server applications now but that's about it.  I always thought that PCI 5.0 was one of the technologies Apple was waiting for since they probably want to design the main features of the motherboard once and PCI 5.0 will probably be with us for a decade.

deminsd said:

pigybank said:

This will fail.  It’s basically another tidal. The major services might gain some small bit of market share by increasing the fidelity of their streamed music, but very few people want to pay the premium for an all HiFi service. 

Do you know anything about Tidal?  HEAVILY RAP / HIP-HOP.   You're saying the Amazon service will be the same?  If not, then it's not "basically another Tidal".

Can you link to your research that supports your claim that "few people want to pay the premium"...for hi-res music?  Maybe you aren't, but I'm guessing Amazon did their research before deciding to make this move.

Tidal is not “mostly rap / hip-hop”.  That kind of music is often on the main landing pages mainly because Tidal’s majority owner (Jay-Z) is a hip hop star and producer.  Frankly this should surprise no one.  But Tidal has plenty of titles in most music genres including the jazz and classical recordings many older audiophiles like.

McJobs said:

People wanted larger screens with slimmer bezels and a PCIe-flash storage as standard across the board. Tim Cook failed again.

Economics aren't quite there yet.  Getting there but not quite there yet.  It's made worse by the fact that Apple continues to have a 3TB hard drive as the top end drive to put in an iMac when it's just as easy to put a 8 or 10 GB these days.  So a 3TB drive is CHEAP (used to be top of the line) where 4TB flash is still expensive.  Now Samsung has just introduced a cheaper 4TB SSD a few months back, but the MTBF rate is less than other products, which could be a long term issue in a machine not designed to be able to replace the SSD at all.

The one piece of the iMac configuration puzzle that I'm not happy with is that no 10gb Ethernet option exists, even as a BTO.  Yes, I know that they still wanted some space between the iMac and the iMac Pro but I think the Xeons + Graphics do that well enough.  The cost of the Aquantia chip set used for 10gbe in the iMac Pro and the Mac Mini (!) is pretty light in the grand scheme of things.  Not sure why it got left out.  You can still get TB3 options if you want 10gbe on an iMac as before, but I don't get why it didn't make the cut.

crowley said:

Well they certainly didn’t copy Apple this time.

Apple theorized a folding LCD display in 1987 with their Knowledge Navigator video.

You never want to price yourselves out of the game.  But at the same time, you have to understand the marketplace.  The original market for the Mac Mini largely changed over the last decade.  You could say the same for machines like the iMac which originally were marketing as the Mac for most buyers before laptops took over as the default machine for most people.

Could you remove features?  Sure.  Could you remove enough features to still make the product worthwhile for a $499 buyer while still satisfying the customer and giving Apple enough margin to build it?  I'm doubtful.  I'm sure this exercise were played out inside of Apple for a while before we got the SKUs we did.  And Apple likely did some quiet market research with customers as well as look at their own Mac Mini purchasing data to figure out what the machine should look like.

The Late 2018 Mac Mini creates a platform that Apple can swap out the few different items that are configurable without changes to the motherboard design: processor (8th gen), flash RAM and DRAM.  Anything else may have caused changes in either the motherboard or form factor, driving up the overall price of the program.