Catering to the majority (of its niche, which is non-Windows, easy to use, all-in-one, curated experience, upmarket PCs) and not to even further niches?
Macintosh is 6-7% of worldwide PC units. At an average sales price of $1200 a unit vs. average Windows PC at $500 a unit, Apple has at least 15% of world wide PC revenues. At 15-20% net margins vs. Windows PC makers average 2-3% margins, Apple's Mac profits are as much as, if not more, than all the Windows PC makers combined.
Over $20B in annual revenues with at least $3B in net profits, that's a hellofa niche. So the question is, why is Apple not updating/refreshing Mac lineups more often, and why don't they have a decent pro model?
Because they get to those numbers without a "decent pro model", so it's not like they feel they need one.
As for getting to even better numbers, well, they had decent pro models (and even servers) back in the day, and they (presumably) know that they don't sell that much.
Their niche will soon figure out there are some people (like OP) running the same software on much better hardware for much lower price. How much longer do you think they will keep buying original macs?
I buy an original mac because I want a machine that does what it does without all the overhead of assembling it myself. if i spend just 2 hours of my time assembling something equal for 400 bucks less, ive gained nothing. and chances are itll take a lot longer than those 2 hours. with a mac, you click a button and receive a machine that is "pretty fuckin good", for 1700-2500 dollars. do I know I could do better? Sure. Do I give a shit, though?
i could almost turn "could macs be good value?" into a mandatory interview question, because those who say no don't understand how trading money for time works. working with such fools is incredibly tedious and painful.
"i could almost turn "could macs be good value?" into a mandatory interview question, because those who say no don't understand how trading money for time works. working with such fools is incredibly tedious and painful."
I would advise against that, unless you are in the habit of interviewing people who value their time at $200+ per hour, such as in your above example. Otherwise, their answer may be coming from a slightly different mindset.
It's an advertising slogan. Whatever happened to Coke wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony and getting sexy women hit on you when you put on Lynx?
Besides, being "the crazy ones" and being a cpu/gpu power hungry is orthogonal. Apple never sold the most powerful computers (except briefly and accidentally, when Motorola did something right).
Just friendly and easy to work with computers -- which the "crazy ones" could get going with without needing an IT debarment. A "crazy one" can be e.g. a human rights activist or some novel graphic artist, that just needs a simple computer to work with.
