While I am not assigning any blame, this is what Apple signed up for as soon as they made the decision to move to Intel x86. This is also the reason why they don’t, and won’t, make a traditional PC tower style Macintosh. Doing so would invite even more comparisons and derision from the PCMR. I venture onto many of the PC gamer oriented sites and it just reads like monkeys flinging their crap at each other. Intel vs. AMD, AMD vs. NVIDIA, iOS vs. Android, Gigabyte vs. Asus and on and on. The raging flame wars over meaningless minutiae is emotionally and mentally exhausting if you spend to much time there.
In my experience, Apple decided with the move to Intel and with the availability of the higher end CPUs (Xeons), that this was the perfect opportunity to move past the typical mini-tower form factor because they knew that they would never be able to compete with Acer, Dell, Gateway, HP and home builders price-wise, which had been a high volume, low margin business for the past 15 years (1991-2006 - the year when Apple moved to Intel). In fact, I think they had already started making the move past the tower form factor with the Power Mac G5. The G5, at the time, was wicked fast and powerful. Apple took that opportunity to introduce the large all aluminum form factor and to raise the entry price of that form factor for users. I know that my bosses were surprised when it came time to move from the Power Mac G4s that they had been using for the past four (4) years. In the end, we leased June 2004 Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0GHz instead of purchasing them. We went with Mac Pro 3,1 in the next lease and then moved to iMac 2012 and then onto iMac 2014/MacBook Pro 2015 before the most recent lease which was all MacBook Pro 2018, except for one 2017 iMac.
My point is that the PC tower model (Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX and Standard ATX) has been around forever and is really the only one that allows someone to pick and choose the exact parts they want to build it themselves. Prices are all over the map because you can build a decent Windows PC for $500 or go crazy and spend all the way up to $4000 for a non-Core-X/Xeon gaming PC that you build yourself with only the parts you want.
Most PC OEMs offer a range of tower PCs from mild to wild as well with different form factors and branding. Dell has no less than 4 different consumer/SOHO computer brands (Alienware, Inspiron, Vostro and XPS) with multiple iterations inside each brand. By contrast, Apple has just two desktop computers (Mac mini and iMac), three if you count the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple releasing a tower PC-based Macintosh is a recipe for disaster...for them. There is no differentiation there and no matter how cool it looks, it’s still just a box. A box that will be poked and prodded and scrutinized and critiqued by people who would rather save $20 bucks by installing a SATA m.2 stick instead of an NVMe stick, because SATA is “good enough” and will criticize Apple left and right for taking away their right to use a cheaper drive if they want. Apple values consistent performance in it’s products and is often lauded for selling “PCs” that offer consistent, predictable performance versus the race to the bottom approach of PC OEMs who start with good intentions, but end up putting out a crap product because they switched memory or storage vendors halfway through production and save a few bucks to increase gross margin a half percent. The customers suffer and so does the business.
Apple tried that one time (Performa) and it nearly killed them. They are not going to make that same mistake again and there is no amount of whining, anger, threats of leaving the platform, Hackintoshing, pleading or shaking your fist that will change their position. I firmly believe that Steve Jobs was the primary driver for getting rid of the tower form factor. He continued them when he took over Apple because it was Apple’s bread and butter and he needed cashflow while he kickstarted the iMac project, but he knew that Apple had to appear to be more than just another PC maker to get and hold people’s interest at that point, because almost everyone had given up on Apple by 1996. The Mac Pro only made it because they already had a case in production that could be adapted for use with larger motherboards and power requirements of the Xeon CPUs, as well as Steve knowing that Pros still needed this kind of form factor for a number of reasons. Ever wonder why Apple never put a Core i5 or Core i7-based system in that chassis? No differentiation from the cheap plastic boxes already on the market, meaning zero upside for Apple.
So here we are in 2019, with the all-in-one iMac sporting a beast of a CPU that has incredible performance, even if it held back by the form factor to an extent, in a package that no one can really top or cares to put much effort into since the users they are catering to believe the tower is the only true expression of form and function. It’s the same as it ever was and will always be...it’s woven tightly into Apple’s DNA and is their philosophy, their mantra, like it or not. Take it or leave it.
