On the
xMac name...
Glad you like it. It's been around since the death of the G4 Cube. It's golden years were during the Power Mac G5 days when Apple started to kill off the $1299 upgradeable Mac tower.
The big boon years were shortly after the Mac Pro was released at above $1999, and everyone hoped and wished for non-Xeon desktop chips in a tower.
The use of the name xMac has kinda trailed off now, but may come back with the introduction of a new Mac Pro, whose price may just start at $2999, and still have a 320GB HDD and 4GB of RAM standard.
Apple does have an interesting problem in their customer use cases: with IIRC roughly 70% of Mac sales being laptops, the days of the desktop are in decline, yet there are nevertheless those "trucks" that still need to exist to support the foundational underpinnings.
To (abuse) this truck analogy, the only truck that Apple makes is the super-heavyduty F350, which clearly meets all "trucky" needs, but beause it is a fully featured professional level commercial duty everything, it costs a pretty penny.
The alternative is just a minivan (iMac) which gets pressed into the role as best as it can, because there is no light duty pickup truck.
I can't understand why Apple wouldn't produce this.
Does Apple not want more buyers able to upgrade their computer?
Simplistically,
no. If we think about it, when we buy an upgrade to a computer, how does the original OEM benefit from having built that upgradability into their product?
The blunt answer (Part I) is that they do
not benefit, because we buy our upgrade from a 3rd Party.
And (Part II) upgradability arguably hurts the OEM, because our ability to upgrade really means that we are able to
defer a new purchase: from the OEM's perspective, it is a lost sale.
So instead of selling us a new desktop Mac every 3 years, we buy upgrades in year 2 and buy a new desktop Mac every 4 years: that's effectively a (4/3) = 33% reduction in sales/profit potential from the OEM's perspective.
FWIW, what makes some of this business decision trades even harder is that while a "Long Life" product hurts their near term bottom line, it can also result in greater customer satisfaction which results in more faithful repeat customers.
The inevitable friction here is the question on if a business decision is made that customer satisfaction rates are "High Enough" so as to literally 'cash in' on some of this goodwill capital.
Is Apple afraid it will take away sales from the iMac or mini? But what about Mac repeat customers that aren't finding anything from Apple that they want to buy? Is it better to lose those repeat customers completely?
That's a hard part of the business model to figure out. Very simplistically, we can perhaps consider what Apple's response has been by looking at notional profit rates.
For example, if we say that a generic iMac sells for $1200, of which $300 is profit ... and that said iMac gets replaced every 3 years, then Apple's annualized profit from that customer is $300/3 = $100/year.
Similarly, a Mac Pro with $1000 profit ... can have a ten year lifespan (after those incremental upgrades from which Apple doesn't benefit) before it gets down to the same benchmark of $1K/10 = $100/year.
Granted, one can point out that the higher-end customer isn't likely to go that many years running his high-end Mac system because of productivity gains and so forth, but there is the aspect of hardware trickle-down, where the old Mac Pro gets figuratively repurposed as something else ... maybe a file server, or maybe under the office Secretary, since an old MP still has plenty of horsepower for email & MS-Office. As such, this internal repurposing results in that business from avoiding buying an iMac or whatever and thus is likely part of the supplier's business plan model.
Is it because Apple is afraid of damaging the elegance of its all in one iMac? The same elegance that is already destroyed because you have to hook up an external drive if you want two hard drives?
More likely it is a recognition that an iMac will definitely be someday retired when its LCD screen goes belly-up, whereas a headless machine can much more easily keep going with merely a new display.
FWIW, I bought an Apple 1705 CRT display back in 1989. I forget when I actually replaced it, but I definitely do recall that I was still using it when I bought my G5 PowerMac in 2003 ... that's at least a 13 year product lifespan, which is not a particularly great thing from the supplier's viewpoint for things to last that long.
-hh
