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Rough as they inevitably are, I found these numbers useful. A cost saving will always be useful to Apple but there are signs, at least in the UK, that they are passing some of it on to the end user.

For example, Mac mini with 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD:
Apple Silicon £899
Intel Silicon £1099
(Another imperfect set of numbers)

The most exciting thing about this to me is that Apple seems to have opened up a sufficiently large performance gap that the average customer will notice it. Suddenly there's a benefit obvious to everyone of paying a little more for an Apple computer.

Beats said:

Apple didn't add any new features which is a shame. Was hoping to see new designs, new App Store, cellular chips, FaceID etc.

Neural engine?

The moves Apple is making are only necessary because FB and others cannot be trusted. If they had made what most people would consider as "reasonable" use of privacy-related data, none of this would likely have happened. By taking such data, along with anything else related that they could find, and ruthlessly sharing, selling and otherwise monetising it they have broken all rules of decent behaviour.

If I invite someone into my house, I don't expect them to then read and share all my personal documents. Apps given access to Contacts for a particular purpose that then copy the entire address book are just one example of such bad behaviour.

I must be missing something:
One is an apple, one is a pear
One has a stalk, one doesn't,
One has a bite out of it, the other doesn't
One has a leaf above it, the other has a leaf beside it

We have a saying in the UK that you can't compare apples and pears (or indeed oranges)...

Since no-one has seriously suggested that we should sweep away bricks and mortar shops, levelling the tax burden with online is essential. As physical retail has shrunk and online grown, this points to raising tax on online business (the alternative of allowing tax revenues, and hence government spending, to reduce isn't credible in these days of COVID and Brexit). In the longer term, perhaps all shopping becomes virtual and makes the need to replace lost tax revenues even greater.

I see no paradox for the likes of Apple. They are first-party witness to the disparity in costs between physical and online and currently, I presume, make greater margins from online than physical. They can watch for a boost in physical sales to cover the increased online costs or just increase prices across the board (by less than 2%!) if this doesn't happen and they don't choose to absorb the cost. Consumers, meanwhile, will see a reduction in the savings they've had from the early days of online shopping.