It’s a space issue. Both on the floor and in the stock room. No use in wasting space on a product that may never sell in store.
Flagships are a special case due to the increased space and the less direct focus on $ per square foot.
Little evidence Apple makes the flagship stores "charity cases'. They spend more but they typically locate them where they will generate more. Often in tourist ways ( Fly to NYC , see the sites , go to famous store , buy something for trip home to where stores are more scarce. ).
Apple tends to trade of much higher $/sq ft costs for higher $/store revenues. A boat anchor Mac Pro that has relatively next to zero sales and much higher inventory costs would actually detract from the year-over-year same store costs for inventory and operating costs.
Some of the flagships have a "Boardroom" that is solely for Apple Business Team presentations and demos.
".. Boardrooms aren’t a company secret but are generally closed to the public. ..."
The iconic wood tables that fill every Apple Store have long been globally admired as symbols of tasteful interior design....
9to5mac.com
[ large reserved places like this aren't in even upscale mall stores.... even in wealthy neighborhoods with no homeless people. ]
For those stores where they have been significant > $5k hardware demos would be more likely to pick up a demo Mac Pro, but it wouldn't be tossed on the generic display tables.
All the Apple Stores would commonly pull even the older cheaper Mac Pros from the floor for certain events. They just never sold in store, even at cheaper prices. Everyone has been ordering BTO online.
Never is probably too strong. It is more so relative sales to the rest of the Mac products in the store. Also not sure how Apple counts "ship to store" toward physical store revenue recognition. (
"show rooming" from their own stores for online sales. )
For the moment the relevant thing is that Apple is selling way more Mac Pros than they have.
Having Mac Pro and XDR isn't going to improve sales because they don't have any more units to ship.
Post holidays when the initial demand bubble is over then they might marginally get a bump by putting a few into a limited set of stores ( with more display room post holidays). Additionally, there will probably be several "ship to store" by the end of the initial demand bubble and also some returns . ( Apple can populate some stores with returns that now have to be somewhat written off anyway. )