Why are they doing this? Trickle down effects for their mass market products? There is no way that the prosumer market is big enough to justify this distraction for Apple even if it used to be their core business line.
Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market. In a way, they never did "mass market". While the prosumer market may be a small proportion of the overall market, it could be very significant, for Apple, relative to the market Apple addresses.
Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.
Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market.
Small is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Apple sold nearly $11 billion worth of Macs last quarter. Once you get out of the HN echo chamber and enterprise IT circles, Macs are quite popular.
In a way, they never did "mass market".
Having an Apple Store within a 20 minute drive of 80% of the American public counts as mass market [1]. Haven't been lately because pandemic but my local Apple Stores were always packed with people. And of course there's a Best Buy, Micro Center and other regional retailers that sell Macs in places with no Apple Stores.
It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with. I've been involved in user groups since the 80's; trust me, most Mac users are just regular people—not music producers and cinematographers.
An M1 Mac mini, which certainly outperforms most PCs in it's price class. The retail price starts at $699 but is available for significantly less via 3rd parties like Amazon.
If you think of the market segment as "non-plastic computers that don't suck", Apple is doing quite well. And now that Apple Silicon performance continues to outpace the industry as a whole, this will continue.
The other segment is the "I like nice things" crowd. They aren't price sensitive; they just like nice things and Macs have that in spades compared to the vast majority of PCs.
> It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with
It's like when people say their iPhone is better quality than a $200 Xiaomi phone. Well, duh??? Why are you even comparing them? If you look at higher tier Xiaomi phones, or in your example, laptops from reputable companies such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, they're much closer in build quality, have a choice of tradeoffs ( you can choose if you want small, light, long battery life, type of screen, ports, performance, etc. and not have Apple choose), and were still quite a bit cheaper than equivalent specs Macbooks. That's no longer quite as valid for laptops due to the M1s l, but is still valid for phones.
"Prosumer" is also a somewhat vague term. It's probably supposed to mean consumers with lots of disposable income, but if you're an engineer, developer, video editor, or studio musician it just means you think of Apple hardware as a business expense.
Yep, this is the requisite "hey Hollywood I know we haven't thought about your studio needs in a while, here's a bone that reminds you why Apple is the industry standard" play.
So, you'd think, and that's certainly what I was thinking when watching the thing... but they teased a future Mac Pro announcement at the end. This is a mid-level machine, apparently (similar to the old iMac Pro, I suppose).
There is a big market of creatives/artists who basically own an apple product as a decent chunk of their personality, for good or bad. Ergo, they'll sell.
The indie professional market is more than big enough to justify this. Small films have been able to roll some pretty impressive vfx on desktop computers recently, and North American creative types tend to love Macs.
I look at it from the other side - why aren’t Dell and Lenovo and HP and Microsoft doing this? Have they given up? Is assembling commodity parts into the same computer everybody else makes the only thing they can do?
