We sold many different models with similar specs, and the main feature many of the potential buyers would be concerned with:
Will it fit with my current office furniture?
We sold both desktops and tower configurations, and the type of desk the computer would be used with was the determining factor in which model to buy.
And with today's PCI-E-based SSD's, waiting for data to be written to "disk" is a non-issue, so the system feels much faster.
In fact, it seems that the opposite is true; as a product gets better, people care more about the specs. Whether you're buying a Wusthof knife or a luxury car, you want to know what makes the product good enough to justify its price and position in the market.
Insofar as people do consider specs, it’s usually because the specs are injected into the conversation, customers being taught to care by salesman trying to baffle them into choosing their product.
Most customers want it to just work. Apple is pursuing that.
I'm not suggesting that no parts can ever be a commodity (like capacitors in a laptop), but as I spend more, I increasingly tend to look for a technical advantage that justifies the marginal price.
I'll give you an example. If you want to buy a docking station for an Apple TB3 enabled MacBook, you have a couple of controller options at the higher end: Alpine Ridge and Titan Ridge. Better chips exist but they haven't found their way into truly well engineered consumer docks. I have a multi monitor setup with one superultrawide screen that can do 120Hz, so I opted for the Titan Ridge dock. It was buggy, so I ended up returning it and buying an Alpine Ridge dock that lacks the ability to push my big monitor at its best-looking resolution. And that's for a sub-$300 peripheral.
Like most of us here on HN, I'm one of the "few" that GP mentioned. But these are consumer products and they are mass marketed based on their technical specs.
Apple itself markets technical innovations in its 6k IPS monitors. The back is designed to dissipate heat, the monitor works with TB3 (ie, an Intel chip)...they even market the glass treatment in a deeply specific way.
I think that's the point. Until now, buying a computer has always been focused on the CPU and RAM stats. If you wanted faster/bigger you had to spend more. With Apple's new strategy you almost don't even care about CPU/RAM stats. They are focusing on providing value in other ways; larger screen, lighter weight, different colors, more ports, etc. I think this is the biggest shift in computers in quite a while and makes it much more akin to purchasing a phone or tablet than specing out a computer.