As part of my purchasing process, I can’t happen but wonder if Apple is going to come out with the expandable desktop solution right after I finish building my own. If so, it’ll be in the $1000-$1500 range and have a good price/perf ratio, just to spite me. There’s a lot of speculation on the net as to whether Apple would do such a thing, with all kinds of arguments on either side (including pointing out that the G4 cube was targeted at the same segment, besides the price, and that was a failure).
I think there are a few arguments that ring true for me. I’ll write them down so that I can look back and either regard myself as a genius or a fool.
* The most obvious reason is that, there’s already a machine in that price range: the iMac. An iMac spec’ed with what I would want in it (2GB and 500G hard drive) is up at $2299, so they adequately fill the gap between Mac mini’s and Mac Pro’s
* Desktops are for ricers. I noticed this as I was spec’ing out the PC I’m gonna get. Gone are the good old days where putting together a PC was normal, and every mom-and-pop computer outfit sold their pre-configured models. All the parts advertised their basic features, reliability, etc. Nowadays, if you’re trying to put together your own machine, you’re most likely a gamer, an overclocker, or both. Which means you’ll pay for ridiculous over-voltaged memory, tacky case designs, and motherboards that let you adjust the voltage by 25 mV increments. Anyways, the point is, this is clearly not Apple’s market.
Apple’s stance always seems to have been, consumers care about integration, and Pro’s care about expandability/customizability. And the ‘prosumer’ market is just too small for them to care about. If they come out with a $1500, expandable desktop, they wont have any more excuse to sell an iMac at $1800, and a Mac Pro at $2500, because the middle model will be a better value and will be expandable enough to match the lower end of the high model.
But who knows, they might surprise us just yet. In either case, hopefully in a few years, the price premium of a Mac Pro won’t bother me as much, and I’ll have much more important things to over analyze.