While they won't be competing with Chromebooks for general education use cases, I could very well see Apple trying to upsell schools on a $599 alternative that happens to run GarageBand, iMovie, and even XCode.
While there is no digitizer, there is a keyboard and a touchpad. Also, I expect Apple is going to try to keep a gap between the base Mac and the iPad price-wise so they would add to the base storage and maybe RAM.
Then again, considering the pricing on the base iPad, maybe they will bring it down to $600.
If your phone is good enough to take care of your day to day computing, you can probably get by with an inexpensive all-in-one computer and save the headache of docking.
(And the GPU, and maybe even more RAM etc).
Then what is the point in docking at all? Now you have to keep track of what's on the dock and what's on the phone. Plus, by the time you integrate all this into a dock, you basically have something that costs as much as an inexpensive PC, so why bother?
One problem is that people expect the CPU power of a laptop, which requires much more power and cooling than the typical tablet. As a consequence in tablet mode a Surface Book has about two hours of battery life.
When looking for IDEs or tooling on iOS I still have not found anything remotely professionally usable... (I mean Visual Studio + Reshaper like, not VS Code...) but perhaps somebody could enlighten me...
Related to your example - $1 burgers are increasingly better, than you would expect. The difference between McDonald's midrange line and, say, a burger at a restaurant for $18 is negligible in flavor. I can no longer justify going to a restaurant and pay $18+tip for a burger.
Oh come on. I get that you're trying to make a point but this is ridiculous.
I’ll eat a $18 hamburger because it tastes really good - yes, about 18x better than a $1 burger.
I'd argue that the functional difference between a Honda Fit and a Tesla is less than the difference between the best McDonald's hamburger and an $18 hamburger. That's why I drive a Honda Fit. In the face of Tesla's increasing sales it would be pretty strange to assert that my taste was somehow universal.
But $18 burger is not drastically better than McDonald's $7 burger.
Try doing an actual blind test, with a control... because the simple fact of perception will make you think one is better.
And then we've come full circle to Apple products.
McDonald's has very high quality preparation standards. Their ingredients and techniques were constructed to facilitate their high-speed, high-consistency process, but prevent them from incorporating things that the overwhelming majority of burger consumers prefer.
For example, the extremely fine grind on the meat, the thin patty, the sweet bread, the singular cheese selection, the inability to get the patty cooked to specification, the lack of hard sear or crust and the maillardization that accompanies it, etc. etc. etc. At a minimum, people prefer juicier burgers with coarser, more loosely-packed texture, usually cooked to lower temperatures (though this depends on what part of the country you're in,) and the flavor and texture differential from a hard sear, be it on a flat top or grill, and toasted bread.
For consumers who, at least at that moment, have a use case that requires their food be cheap, fast, and available, well we know who the clear winner is.
In my new career as a software developer and designer, I use apple products. I am willing to pay for the reliable UNIXy system that can also natively run industry-standards graphics tools without futzing around with VMs and things, and do all that on great hardware. There will always be people who aren't going to compare bits pushed to dollars spent and are going to be willing to spend the extra few hundred bucks on a device they spend many hours a day interacting with.
This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
I don't doubt you know more about food. If you applied that knowledge to my actual point instead of what it appears you assumed my point was, this assertion might have been correct.
That's not entirely your fault, I was making a slightly different point than the exiting conversation was arguing, so it's easy to bring the context of that into what I was trying to say and assume they were more related than they were.
The belittling way in which you responded though, that's all on you.
> This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
My point, applied to this, would be to question what other products you've tried? My assertion is that people perceive other products to be maybe 50%-70% as good, when in reality they are probably closer to 85%-95% as good (if not better, in rare instances). That is a gap between perception and reality.
As applied to burgers, I was saying that people that refuse to eat at McDonald's because of quality probably have a very skewed perception of the actual differences in quality in a restaurant burger compared to a McDonald's burger.
I'm fully prepared to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time. I also don't see how anything you said really applies to my point, so I don't think you've really proven I'm wrong yet.
I wasn't annoyed by you misunderstanding, I was annoyed by you misunderstanding, assuming you understood my position completely because it would more conveniently fit with your existing knowledge, and then using that assumed position to proclaim your superiority and my foolishness.
It's not about deep conversational chess on my part, it's about common decency and not assuming uncharitable positions of others by default on your part. A problem, I'll note, that you repeated in the last comment.
Just the mere perception of quality will increase your satisfaction levels. The perception of lack of quality will reduce you satisfaction levels.
Thus I still maintain that your "perfect" $18 burger is only marginally better than McDonald's midrange burger. The fact that you actually spend time on making that burger more appetising - is proof that the low cost foods are getting better and better.
While focusing on my analogy, you literally prove my overall point.
30 years ago you weren't necessary, as low cost food wasn't nearly as good as today. Now - you have to exist to justify that premium.
I eat at McDonald's all the time, and I also get pricey burgers ($13-18) from a local place that makes the best I've ever had.
You can't be serious. If you are, I've gotta say if anyone has a perception issue about their respective quality it's you.
I was making a point less about McDonald's being equivalent to a restaurant burger and more about people's perceptions of McDonald's and how bad it is. That is, there's probably a lot less difference in the taste of those burgers than a lot of people want to admit.
The other aspect to consider is consistency. I had a $14 burger at a restaurant on Saturday that I would have been happy to swap in any single burger I've ordered from McDonald's in the last 12 months. You may not consider it high quality at McDonald's, but you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get.
All I'm really doing is making a point that there's a bit of fetishism about luxury items going on these days. Are Apple devices generally higher quality than many competitors? Yes. Is the difference in quality in line with most people's perception of the difference in quality? I don't think so.
This may be the single worst analogy I've ever seen.
There is no amount of money you can pay at McDonalds to get a good quality burger.
I don't spend $18 for burgers, since there are a million places where you can pay $5-8 dollars and get a damned good piece of beef. But not at McDonalds.
$5-8? At a food truck? The ones that make burgers of an extremely varied quality?
I’ve eaten at McDonald’s around the world, it really depends but they do have good burgers when they’re cooked right.
And the remaining 10% would indirectly benefit benefit their iPhone cash cow in the form of keeping people inside the ecosystem.
The Mac silicon is inheriting the investments Apple made in the iPhone CPUs. This will continue. The bits which Apple invests to make their existing hardware scale to desktop and high end laptops won't benefit the iPhone much at all. On future generation chips, Apple will spread the development costs over a few more units, but since iPhone + iPad ship several times more units than the Mac, the bulk of the costs will be born by them.
`(development cost + (units sold * incremental cost) ) / units sold`
But a lot of Macs have higher end Intel CPUs so the per/ unit cost of Intel CPUs is pretty damned high.
Which of the inputs going into making that device would have applied any inflationary pressure?
Most if not all the parts would have probably got cheaper over that time and wage pressure is always low only because of where these devices are made.
Edit-they also went from being a company with around 8500 employees in 2000 to 137000 today. Surely every part of their organization chart has contributed toward pressures to otherwise push up their prices to maintain revenue.
Another factor is perceived risk. Since the markets are always worrying about the current US China trade talks, that uncertainty helps gold and silver as they are seen as safe havens.
That's unsupportable
Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less.
Shareholders benefit from increased market share just as much as they do from increasing margins, arguably more. The base iPad and the iPhone SE both "cannibalize" their higher end products, but significantly expand their base. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a $800 MacBook enter their lineup shipping with the same CPU as the iPad.