Shareholders would ask for an Apple offering as cheap as $499 which has resulted in the mini as we know it today. They dont necessarily care about how Apple achieve that and couldn’t dictate specifics. You can see this in the quarterly results calls where big investors and journalists get to ask questions of the senior team. It’s been said before that Apple don’t know how to make a computer for under 500 that wasn’t junk.
Consumers can demand whatever they like. In the old days it was Steve who was the final arbiter. Today there’s probably more market research and focus groups influencing product development but one thing that Apple have almost forgotten about is the halo effect of professionals who kept Apple going in the dark days before the iMac, iPod and iPhone.
If there is a work flow team influencing things at Apple now for professionals you imagine they are asking for user replaceable parts and probably internal storage as well as the highly predictable request for more cores and Vega GPU. It’s vitally important to be able to maintain uptime of hardware if you can replace faulty RAM or storage. Or internally add industry standard additional storage or peripherals.
I’d imagine that Mac mini colo would be asked their opinion in the workflow side of things as they’d be a big buyer of headless hardware.
We just have to hope that Apple decide that there’s a significant base of us hobbyists who would make it worth their while to produce a reasonably priced product for.
