This is a point I'm 100% in agreement with you on! :)
> But it nevertheless exists in every major brand, and big companies buy them en masse, or at least: enough of them to make the manufacturing of these models worth itself.
I used to be in a role where I had purchasing information for computers for a nationwide big-box retail chain. You would be surprised at how low the order quantity on some of those 17" laptops is. I'm not talking about for the stores but for the manufacturer. Often it's in the low thousands (per market, of which there's really only 4 and for those laptops really 2). Those big laptops are a price anchor to sell more mid-range laptops that have higher margins. Big laptops get the least amount of hardware design engineering effort/QA. Their volume is low enough that the support costs are minimal, even if many of them malfunction or fail. Toshiba in particular is notorious for this.
Apple sells north of 5 million Mac computers a quarter. A freakin' quarter! It is absolutely not profitable for them to divert attention to low volume products. The opportunity cost lost is enormous. They could spend their efforts making the existing inventory a fraction of a percent cheaper or more successful and it would dwarf any profits made from a 17" laptop.
Most of those other brands can afford to sell 'performance' laptops mainly because they have to: they aren't selling 20 million laptops a year. Keep in mind, PC sales have _cratered_ and Lenovo is bleeding money. So is HP, but this year they had an up year...mostly off of selling Chromebooks.
Toshiba isn't what I see in enterprise environments... there I see HP and Dell, but especially Lenovo/Thinkpad.
> It is absolutely not profitable for them to divert attention to low volume products. The opportunity cost lost is enormous.
I agree with you on the general point. The problem and danger for Apple is: their initial success and brand was built by artists (no matter if photo, video or audio) and designers where the performance of Apple equipment pretty much left Windows based systems dead in the water. When these professionals jump ship to Windows, the appeal of Apple as "hip" and "modern" gets lost.
Apple does not have much time left to prevent this - people doing heavy loads like 4K or 8K video work are already jumping ship left and right where possible (of course, anecdata rather than scientifically valid data, but the trend is alarming) because Apple equipment fails to deal with the requirements on every front... especially as more and more video production shifts to 4K.
The only video production houses I know still using Apple only buy it because the people in charge of purchasing either are 10 years out of date or they want their clients to see all the slick, expensive hardware they have around the office as a truth signal.
The market has proved that Apple doesn't have to care.
Not much to cling for, actually - I jumped ship from Windows only three years ago and back then, it was fine. The problem is that software seems to have evolved as if RAM is an infinite resource (hello, Electron apps, especially Slack). Windows ecosystem has kept up with the demand, Apple... not so much.
> That market is deader than dead in every brand.
But it nevertheless exists in every major brand, and big companies buy them en masse, or at least: enough of them to make the manufacturing of these models worth itself. Only exception is Apple, and that's part of why professionals are highly afraid that Apple has lost its track.