Your statement is of course, true. Macs would also be more value for the money if they were free. Yay free.
Frankly this is a stale old argument. I did some research to see if I could find these really cheap high performance windows PCs that people seem to imply are out there. I found a razor that was uber heavy, had crappy battery life and was expensive, didn't even sport the Geekbench scores the M2 Pro or Max do. did I mention expensive?
So yes, we would all like to have cheaper and better products, but it is a competitive market, other companies do not give away their products either.
I totally get you, I do think that the upgrade prices on Ram and SSDs is high
As you ignored my post I will point out again.
Tim cooks apple is all squeezing out every last penny...
Aside from the fact that storage and memory flatlined when he took over he also puts out de-contented base models.
The base iMac for example is ridiculous and shouldn't exist. They have to manufacture an entire SKU just to build one with two fewer USB ports, 1 fewer fan (leading to a hotter machine as found in independent testing) and without the gigabit ethernet power adapter. This model seems to me to exist only to drive people to the middle model.
Or you could look at how often Apple partners introduced product updates after 2014. Kind of difficult to get that new Mac out if the company whose CPUs you are using hasn't introduced a new chip in a while... Much of the Mac "golden age" under Steve Jobs was thanks to predictable and steady product refreshes from their partners. Intel was bringing out new CPU revision every six months like clockwork, which allowed Apple to refresh Macs two times per year as well. If you study the timeline you will see that Mac refresh cycles started slipping exactly the moment Intel started stumbling.
Can't say that I am a big fan of Tim Cook, he doesn't strike me as a visionary or a person of particular passion, and there is too much bean counting and profit optimisation and not enough striving for excellence under his leadership, but he had to steer the company during some pretty crappy times, and I have to say he did it fairly well. Not to mention that he led Apple though a major risk of a technological transition, which hasn't been executed perfectly, but then, Covid, Russia... can't blame Cook for all these things either.
Consider the Mac mini:
2012-2014 Mac mini - decontented
2014-2018 Mac mini - ignored despite new CPUs from Intel that would fit in it
Or the Mac Pro
While the trashcan was a thermal corner there were Broadwell Xeons, Skylake Xeons, Cascade Lake Xeons. All of which had better performance per watt even if Apple would not have been able to put in the absolute max core count chip.
The GPU front also stumbled, there were subsequent AMD GPUs that could have fit. I also think they could have done more optimizations in that chassis to improve the performance. They just abandoned it.
I know that Intel stumbled, but Mac releases stumbled more than Intel did.
Tim Cook has lead the company through the Apple Silicon transition in an okay way. However his relentless focus on monetization at the expense of customer UX is clear throughout the company.
Edit: I don't expect yearly Mac Pro updates, it is a machine that really doesn't need yearly updates. It should get updates more frequently than every 6 years however. The 2019 model is going to be at least 3.5 years old when the M series replaces it, and it could be 4 years old if it takes till this fall to get an M2 Extreme or whatever we're calling it.
