ARMacs prices?

[ader42]

The AS Dev Kit has 16gb RAM so that should be the minimum for AS Macs. Imho.

 

[deconstruct60]

I think they do care about market share now. They haven't until now but they need to expand their base further to increase services revenue further.

Expanding Apple TV+ to LG, Samsung , Sony , Roku, TVs increases Apple's service revenue potential and doesn't necessarily result in one new AppleTV hardware sale at all. Similar with Apple Pay. What is better 2% of all purchases spent on Apple products or 0.5% of 80% all purchases a consumer makes on everything. Apple Card comes with a physical card that is detached from the iPhone. ( Same thing happened previously with iTunes. It didn't completely take off revenue wise until iTunes was on Windows also. Apple Music is on Android. )

The other huge presumption is that Apple services offerings have penetrated 100% of the current Apple product user market. ( e.g., 75-80+ % of all iPhone users all buy paid for iCloud drive services. )

Apple chasing after people with much lower disposable income isn't necessarily going to bring them more services revenue. If didn't have enough money to buy the $200 more expensive mini then decent chance that don't have another $80-150 per year to spend on higher priced Apple services.

The other factor is Apple is "giving away" services for large blocks of time with hardware purchase. Most likely that is a bundled charge ( or charge back).

Apple "services" being mostly App store subscription tax. Don't really need a huge unit sales increase there to keep making money each year. As long as the user base is paying money every year then it is a re-occuring revenue stream. Yes, need to bring in "new customers" each year but it by no means necessarily demands some huge market share grab (.... kill margins on hardware short term to maybe get a re-occuring revenue stream bump later. ) Again more important to get people who will continuous pay ( i.e., don't blink at the monthly/annual charge on credit card) than chasing folks with sharp eyed budget restrictions.


I think folks are fooling themselves that Apple is going to jump large scale into some "loss leader" business where they "rob Peter to pay Paul across the product units " to drive growth.

The majority of the services products have much more revenue scale potential when unhooked from the Mac product unit numbers; not more tightly coupled to them .

As for high-end, now that people buying RAM upgrades are a captive audience who cannot go elsewhere, Apple really ought to relent a bit on the RAM prices. This would help a lot with those spiralling top end costs.

They probably should scale back a bit, but Apple is probably hooked in RAM and SSD capacity mark ups like crack addict. Until unit sales crater substantially, they just probably won't quit.

 

[Boil]

Question: do you think AS Mac base models will still have 8GB RAM? I was hoping for a switch to 16 but now the new 27” iMac still has 8, would be strange if the new 24” would suddenly get 16GB.

I would think the 2020 27" iMac starts at 8GB is because it has an access door for the end user to upgrade their own RAM. If I were going to pull the factory RAM & replace it with a higher capacity, then I would want to order the lowest amount of RAM possible... Which is 8GB...

 

[Hexley]

what do you think about ARMacs future prices? I assume that should be cheaper to produce as I expect everything to be integrated, non user replaceable memory nor disk. And they could reuse a lot of its current infrastructure for the mobile devices. The other thing is if Apple wants to reflect this on final prices...

Apple dropped prices of the Mac mini as it appears that the price barrier of top 20% desktops have dipped by $100.

MBA is still at $999.

I doubt Apple will go after the bottom ~80% of any market except for iPads.