Apple may have, at times, served the pro market well, but not lately. They used to view high-end consumers as a means to the end of getting more market share. Get the people who give advice that's listened to into your ecosystem and others will follow. The same thinking is why they used to aggressively market to schools and universities. Apple doesn't really need to do that anymore. Now they just need something that looks really cool sitting in their stores and people will lust after it, talk endlessly about it, and that will bring in more customers.
Apple might go back to a boring, rectangular box that's upgradeable and uses non-proprietary parts, but this would be a remarkable reversal of their trend towards more and more disposable products with proprietary everything, right down to connectors, interfaces, and screws. It's more likely the next pros will be gorgeous but designed to be as unfriendly to DIY upgrades as possible. Proprietary SSD connectors. Soldered on memory. You name it.
In short, while you may love Apple phones and laptops, maybe you don't really want a dev machine built by today's Apple.
When this happens to the next Mac Pro, they're not going to have as much content for their app stores when pros inevitably move to another platform. Windows still isn't ideal to a lot of people but it's starting to get good enough: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about
The Mac Pro is not a simple nor minimal design. It's actually quite a complex design that is optimized for space over flexibility, arguably not good UX. The old Mac Pro, on the other hand, was a great design. It could be criticized as being too expensive, but it was configurable, and very easy to configure to boot. It perfectly met it's target audience.
In summary, I don't think you understand the goals modern UX design and are wrongly assigning blame.
Small example - the Google Maps app on iOS used to have a "Show route" button. You could tap it while driving to zoom out and see the entire route.
Now that space has a menu, and you have to tap the menu and then select the zoom view. Two taps.
This is literally a potential disaster while driving because you have to think about what you're doing, look at the screen for longer, and keep your hand coordinated long enough to tap correctly.
This is not solving the user's problem - unless the user's problem is a secret desire to rear end the car in front.
This used to be called style over substance, or form over content - and it's everywhere, from flat/material design that doesn't distinguish between buttons and labels, to mystery meat burger menus, to invisible options that are so well hidden users never discover them, to useful ports and hardware features that disappear and have to be replaced by a pack of ugly dongles.
Minimalism is great when it solves the user's problems. When it creates new problems for the user, it's not so great.
Far too many designers - including some famous names at Apple - don't seem to understand this.
This probably violates the Google Maps EULA if not the law in some places.
Since this principle applies many other areas of design (beyond application UI design), I'd like to add a specific example: watch faces.
I've been thinking about buying a new wrist watch and was looking for watch faces that aren't totally overloaded with unnecessary (and frankly, usually rather ugly) markings. One simple way to do this is by typing "minimalist watch face" into your favorite search engine.
Seeing those results, I am still amazed at how many "novel, stylish" watch face designs there are that might look cool (not really according to my taste, but perhaps someone else would like it), but are obviously terrible at doing the one thing a watch is supposed to do: telling you the time.
Compare the Nevo watches (ignoring their smart watch part)[1] against the Nava Ora design[2] for example. To me, it's really clear which of the two designs is a better watch.
Unfortunately it was a gift from a significant other so I just put up with it for a few months and then stopped wearing it.
And in a lot of ways thats the "magic" of apples minimalism by focusing on the 1st 10 hours of use by an unsophisticated user you get to develop highly acclaimed UX that fail the sophisticated users to the point that most developers resort to zsh and vim in order to stay productive.
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this is a crisp characterization of the problem of silicon valley product design today. almost every redesign of major products brings a simpler, more beautiful design which ends up being less useful.
i'm strongly in the boat that the purpose of design is to solve people's problems in ways that are hard to think of but easy to appreciate. in the way that a good symphony is hard to write but easy to recognize.
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in the 90s the design of mass products like AOL got too complex and it created an opportunity for people to enter the market with simpler designs which were more usable. but now we've gone too far. the designs are simpler than ever, but no longer in the service of greater usability. it's time to make tech product design less minimal, less simple, but more useful.
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the culture of designers is a core part of the cause of over pivot. it's elegant to list out a series of design principles (interface guidelines) and then reject every problem that can't be solved within those principles. it's elegant, but does not necessarily produce better product designs.