It's the opposite for me. I wonder how much money Apple is leaving on the table by making their devices too good, to the point where people just aren't upgrading as often.
I actually sort of think these are sort of the same problem, to be honest. Yes, the Apple silicon machines are great performers (for laptops anyway — with a desktop, where power efficiency doesn’t matter as much, I don’t think the Apple silicon offerings are as impressive, comparatively) and if you want an incredibly fast laptop that has terrific battery life and is silent or makes very little noise, Apple is the leader by a significant margin.
Having said that, Apple has given users very few reasons to upgrade from a 2020/2021 machine and even worse, to choose a 2024 machine over an older model. Now, part of that is the absolute out of the park home-run Apple hit with the first Apple silicon laptops in 2020 and the redesigned 14/16 MBP in 2021. There is a good argument to be made that the performance was so good, especially compared to the late-model Intel laptops, it was almost *too* much. Like, I think there is a business argument someone would some that if Apple had shipped the initial M1 series devices but capped them at 80% of the performance they offered, they might have shortened the upgrade cycle. To be clear, I’m glad they didn’t do that, but I think you can make the argument that they went faster/more efficient than they needed to, in retrospect.
The other part of the elongated upgrade cycle is that the subsequent machines just haven’t offered a lot of reason for people to upgrade, and not just because the old ones were so good, but because the base offerings of the new machines aren’t different enough for the price. In fact, there are some regressions (like the SSD speed in the 2022 base model MBAs and the memory bandwidth downgrade for all but the 16-core Max chips in the late-2023 MBPs). And at least for the 14”/16” model, Apple has introduced more variants that have effectively raised prices compared to the highest end 2021/early 2023 variants (The highest specced M3 Max with 128GB of RAM is $1000 more than the highest specced M1 Max with 64GB of RAM 2021 model and $600 not than the highest-specced M2 Max with 96GB of RAM).
But put the high-end models aside, those are the whales anyway, look at the MBAs: the base specs are still the same as they were 4 years ago: 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. The starting price is higher than it was 4 years ago and they are still selling the 2020 model at Walmart and the 2022 model for $999. Usually, after 4 years, there would be people who would want to upgrade their laptop. But it’s a hard sell when the processor improvements are still incremental and the base config is the same.
Apple can’t do much about the incremental processor spec bumps, but it can make the base configurations more compelling. A customer who got an MBA in 2020 or 2021 and enjoyed it but finds the storage a little tight and the RAM insufficient might be willing to upgrade if another base model was 16/512. But when it will cost $1500 minimum to get that spec for an M3, which might be 150% of what you paid for your 2020 MacBook Air, that’s a much harder upgrade decision to make.
So yes, they might be leaving money on the table on account of how good the Apple silicon chips were, especially at first. But I think they are equally losing customers who would upgrade or consider upgrading their machines by keeping the base specs so anemic in 2024, especially when RAM and storage are the main performance differentiators for the entry-level machines.
