I think Apple is nuts to announce it so close after launching the Apple Studio Display,
ISTR the rumours were two displays: a successor for the XDR Pro and a new "affordable" display.
If there's still a display in the pipeline, odds are it's the "new" XDR Pro and will be 2-4 times the price of the Studio display and launched alongside whatever the new Mac Pro (which Apple have now teased) is going to be.
In fact, from all I have read, the Macintosh was very successful at the beginning, but then sales declined. The computer was very compelling but also underpowered for its price.
I don't think the Mac ever sold in numbers to rival IBM et. al. However, it was unique (for anything close to the price) in having a graphical user interface, a powerful 68000 chip with a 32-bit instruction set, and a 72ppi screen with high-res bitmapped graphics (...it
looks like a tiny screen today, but the resolution was high for the time: 512x342 when the typical screen was 320x200 or 540x200, limited by the low vertical resolution of TV-standard electronics).
What
really carved the Mac a niche was the introduction of the LaserWriter printer and PagerMaker software in 1985, which pretty much invented the whole "Desktop Publishing" thing. Although the printer was too expensive for the typical single user, it had built in, 'it just works', Localtalk networking, so by the time you set up a workgroup with half-a-dozen Macs sharing a Laserwriter the cost was very reasonable - especially since the IBM PCs of the day
really wasn't up to DTP work, so the "competition" was having your people call Xerox's people to lease something incredibly expensive...
Apple's main business was still the Apple II.
Which was in trouble by 1984 after the Apple III became one of the most notorious failures in the IT industry. Apple II had got
everywhere - in the US at least (we had far cheaper homegrown alternatives here in the UK) - so Apple did keep making money from Apple II successors for years, but they'd lost the initiative.
At the time the original Macintosh launched, there were several competitors in the computing arena. IBM, Apple, Commodore, Microsoft.
By 1984, the IBM PC had come to dominate "serious" personal computing, especially the business market. That's what the famous "1984" commercial that launched the Mac was all about. Commodore, Atari, Tandy (...plus Sinclair, Amstrad, Acorn in the UK) never really got into the "serious business" market (where the suits used PCs and the creatives used Macs) - which was a huge injustice in some cases (the Commodore Amiga had a brief moment in the sun in TV production, the Atari ST had it's moment as a cheap Mac-like system, and was also the go-to system for music).
However, what finally wiped those out
including, eventually, IBM's own PC division was the flood of cheap IBM-compatible clones built from standard components mass-produced in huge quantities - with Microsoft, who had cunningly sticked to licensing software to all comers and stayed out of hardware - getting a tithe from each sale to support software development. Nobody building custom hardware could compete with that. At the same time, PC hardware/software was improving so Apple largely lost their "uniqueness" and weren't getting the income to keep up.
Although the iMac and OS X get credit for reviving Apple's fortunes, they came at an opportune moment when Microsoft had completely missed the bus on the Internet - the iMac targeted a niche for an all-in-one 'connected' computer for which running PC software
wasn't the be-all and end-all. The iMac might not have worked 5 years earlier. Microsoft supporting Office on Mac (partly to give them a fig-leaf against anti-trust accusations) was also crucial.
2. Apple monitors have always been overpriced and limited. Apple hasn’t cared. Way back when, their color screens used proprietary trinitron tubes with fixed 72dpi resolutions and Apple ceded the large screen dp market to radius and Princeton and the mainstream monitor market to NEC multisync.
Those early Apple Trinitron displays were
very high quality at the time, and used non-standard interfaces... Plus, with Apple's main market niche being DTP, being calibrated to exactly 72dpi (1 pixel = 1 point, at least using the re-defined 'Adobe point') was actually a selling point. It's not like the early NEC Multisyncs were cheap (I remember pining for one when I had an Atari ST, for which the alternative was one display for high-res monochrome and another for low-res colour).
If you look at Apple's history, they've often started off with a unique product - often creating the maket segment from scratch - and then ceded the market once viable, mass-produced, third-party alternatives appear. They might drop the product completely or just keep an old model on the books for a silly price for anybody who wants an all-Apple system. See Displays, Printers, Wireless routers, the XServe...
They can always offer something unique with the Mac, because nothing else is licensed to run Mac OS (and, apart from the Intel period 2006-2020, Macs have been based on radically different hardware to PCs). They can only get away with the Studio Display because it's almost the only game in town if you must have a 5k panel. Otherwise, there's not a lot of point in them trying to compete with the low-margin mass market.
