Not sure why you attributed "greedy Tim Cook hates me" to any comment I've made since it's pretty clear I haven't come close to saying anything like that. My criticism of an idiotic comment can't be construed as a criticism of Apple. Duma supported his argument with more nonsense. Nothing in his reply to me explains why customer price would go down due to Apple's lower cost. It just tries to obfuscate by talking about Apple wanting to meet their margin objectives. Maybe read better next time.
As to why Apple is keeping cost low, that's simple. They want, like any business, to keep their cost low because it helps to improve their margins and profit. A larger margin on say, for example, Macs helps keep the overall margin in their preferred zone when they may take a little hit in margin on phones for example because they had to pay more to Samsung for the more expensive OLED. (please don't get caught up in my example... it's just an example of margin management)
Apple gets their cost lower so they in turn lower the cost of their items to the customer... ←yeah bud, that has never been a thing.
Sorry, to be clear I didn't mean to attribute that comment to you personally, it's just in the air all around this discussion...
"Improve" is kind of an unclear term here. Like any business they want to increase their profit. Profit is the direct measure of value created. What it means to improve their margin can vary-- but the key point is that it's not true that increasing margin always increases profit.
Profit is a product of two quantities: margin and unit volume. Price is basically cost * (1+margin). Most demand curves are downward sloping, so unit volume decreases as price increases. Profit increases as volume increases. Profit increases as margin increases from zero to some optimal value, and then decreases as margin exceeds that value because demand falls off.
Additionally, there's a certain minimum margin Apple feels they need to maintain to cover engineering and other costs.
So, when deciding whether to sell a product a company will decide if it is sufficiently profitable and whether the margin is sufficient to meet their operating costs.
Macs are among the smallest wedges in the Apple revenue pie. Increasing their margin on Macs won't offset a declining margin on phones. Services have a significantly higher margin than hardware so hardware margins won't do much to prop them up either.
So, if gross margins are constant, and costs go down, then price=cost*(1+margin) will go down.
Now, Apple has never been a company to chase the low priced market, and the Mac Pro certainly isn't a cut rate product, but for any product they make, they would prefer to keep their prices down by reducing cost rather than reducing margin or compromising on design.
