Cook is doing exactly what he's best at, which is what you said. Optimizing every last cent out of a process.

Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.

So you don’t remember back in the first Apple heyday of the 80s when Jean-Louis Gassée was leading the charge (no he wasn’t the CEO) to sell overpriced Macs with 40% profit margins?

There's nothing wrong with a high profit margin. I'm all for it.

I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc.

But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.

The problem in the 80s was that the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow. When Windows became good enough, no one bought Macs and it almost killed Apple.

Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.

> Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

Apple explicitly claims the iMac is for "pros" in the article this page is discussing:

"iMac is ideal for pros"

"iMac is loved by consumers and pros alike."

"the most demanding pro workloads."

"even a pro studio."

and more.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/imac-gets-a-2x-perfor...

Not the same iMac. If all iMacs should be for consumers and Pros should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

So, yes, Apple describes some iMacs that are not iMac-Pros as "for Pros".

> should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

Nope, those are each about $400 retail (well, the delta from 32GB->64GB is only about $200 retail), and won't benefit everyone.

But at this point, every iMac they sell with the HDD or fusion drive will meet your description of "the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow."

They should deliver the OS installed on a 128GB SSD ($25 retail) just to preserve the reputation of the platform.

The difference is that you could not get a Mac as fast as the then current PC at any price until the switch to Intel.

Even during the brief period where the PowerPC was faster than the current Intel processors, Macs were hobbled by an OS that was still partially emulated and bus speeds that were slower than PC motherboards. Not to mention the anemic graphics hardware.

I know what happened and I'm concerned it's going to happen again, soon

2015 to be exact. Both the iPhone 6S and MacBook Pro 2015 are the absolute pinnacle of Apple tech before they started to do absurd year-on-year price raises and introducing backgrades (no 3.5mm port, bad keyboard, touchbar, no magsafe).

I purchased a (I believe) mid or late 2014 model Macbook Air with the upgraded CPU and RAM and it's one of the best computers I've owned. Very snappy still to this day, extremely durable, and it wasn't terribly expensive compared to other laptops with similar hardware/form factor.

Hasn't Apple always been more of a 'pretty good hardware, nicely integrated and packaged, for a premium price' proposition? I personally can't remember a time when this wasn't so.

Not sure outside their exhibition pieces which nobody really buys (10k fully specced mac pros etc) they've ever been going to market with a 'best hardware in class' story, have they?

You are right, but for a while this was not true. When Apple switched to x86 the MacBook was competitively priced. I remember buying one because it was cheaper than comparable PCs.

It depends. Their SSDs are state of the art and among the fastest you can get. Their 5K display still hasn't any serious alternatives. Their own mobile (for now) CPUs are pretty much unmatched.

Most other desktop components can obviously be found in various PCs as well.

"pretty good hardware"

This is the part they gave up on, while keeping the other two.

The iMac has other configs and if you are a power user, you can get the specs you want. Maybe Apple does have some customers for the low end config that’s not obvious. Why should your opinions limit their choices?

Because hard drives have become "this is so slow that it harms your products reputation to use them". The bottom of the SSD pile is still many, many times faster than the fastest hard drive.

Because "ignoring your customers' opinions" isn't a particularly effective marketing strategy?

They aren’t. That’s why they offer multiple configurations.....