3- I wholeheartedly agree. Apple needs a midrange tower which is user upgradeable.
Ahh... No.
The whole market is shifting to laptops at a growing pace. Apple's most popular models are now the laptops - they account for over half the sales now. With firewire and USB there is very little you can't "add" externally - and it is far more user friendly than grubbing about in the guts of a system.
A midrange tower is a small and poorly defined niche market item. Apple would be barking to consider producing such a system. It goes against their entire (apparent) strategy/business.
1. Support. By keeping the number of systems and their configurations down to a minimum it simplifies support and repair.
2. Retail Market Model. Apple have taken a very different approach to that of - say - Dell. Dell operate a tight stock managment system that also has them frequently updating their products. In a direct sales environment this works as their are no large piles of inventory. Apple one the other hand have a retail market model - with a long stock tail. Combined with their own stores, there are all the third party resellers to consider. Frequent updates are not possible in this environment - the retail end of things would forever be selling products at end-of-line discount. Products thus have a long lifecycle between updates.
3. Target Market. Dell built market share by pitching at the low end. Sure they sell top of the line systems too - but most of their sales are right at the low end. Problem is the margins there have been shrinking. Dell may not be in a death spiral, but thay have seen their profits cut by half. Apple just does not play in that market - so no "mini tower". The Mini is sold as much on the form factor as price. It is typical Apple in that it is not a typical low end machine. The iMac - well - is the iMac. No other company has produced a sucessful line of all-in-one desktops. The Mac Pro is the industrial-grade rig. And then there is the laptop range. None of this stuff is pitched at the low end of the market. Apple focus on where there is a profit to be made. Never forget that in the end - that is Apple's overriding consideration.
4. Component/Design Re-Use. Just take a look at the lineup. The Mac Mini and MacBook are esentially the same hardware. Just packaged up differntly. The same is true of the iMac and MacBook Pro. This re-use saves Apple money on development and support. It saves them money on percurment as they can wring the maximum savings on bulk orders. The Mac Pro is the only exception - but then it does have a high sticker price.
The case against the midrange tower...
Ground up product design. This would be a system that uses virtually no component with any of the other Apple systems (hard disks and optical drives aside). No point in a multiprocessor system - that is what the Mac Pro is. A "smaller" Mac Pro would not cost very much less. No. the midrange tower would use a different processor (Intel desktop 2 or 4 core) - which is not used in any existing Mac. A different chipset - which is not used in any existing Mac. A different kind of memory - which is not used in any existing - Mac. A differnet case. In short this would be a ground up design with none of the cost savings that Apple enjoys on the other lines.
OS/Software. Being an all-new system, Apple has support it in software in the OS. That adds to their costs.
After sales support. Yet another product line. More support requirments. Training. Spares. Etc.
So adding a midrange tower would be a non-trivial undertaking. For such a niche system (aside from switching graphics cards to make it a "killer gaming rig", nobody has ever defined just what this mythical beast is suppored to do that cannot be done with an existing system), it just does present a good business case.
On the other hand - if the numbers are correct - Apple have increased their market share from 5% to 8% (that is a 60% growth) without the aid of a midrange tower. Considering that Apple have done so without targeting the low end of the maket with low cost/low margin products (which is what the midrange would be), but is doing so with its slow product cycles and high margins.
Sounds like a company with a working business plan to me.
If some people don't like it, I hear Dell are still in business (for the time being).