What most people want is not always relevant.
If you mean x86 users then they're not a market Apple is interested in serving.
Most people don't use Apple devices. Does that mean that Apple should ignore what the people using them want when designing new devices?
Apple has a performance / use case team to determine what directions their SoC and product lines will target next.
As such the devices we are seeing is what >80% of all Mac/Apple users are looking for.
When sales does not reflect this they either space out further any R&D spend or halt the product line all together.
Most Apple users don't use Macs. Does that mean that Apple should ignore Mac users when designing Macs?
That's a silly statement. The Macs of today reflects the use case priorities of >80% of its users. I get there are users for the Mac Pro with PCIe expansion slots but Apple appears to have determined that >50% of their Mac Pro users do not want to pay for that feature. It is reflective on the 2013, 2017 and 2022 Pro desktops without it.
Sometimes a market/user base grows too small to be worth the bother. So you either space out refresh to ~4 years or let others service it as it may not be worth the time, effort and money anymore.
Most Mac users don't buy high-end models. Does that mean that Apple should ignore high-end users when designing high-end models?
All Apple devices are high-end. You can tell from the Apple tax. If you mean Apple not catering to users with very unique use case then it has to show specific volumes to be worth Apple's time to bother with it.
Power users form a larger share of Mac users than Windows users, because power users are more likely to buy expensive computers. On the intellectual level, Apple knows what power users want and how to deliver it. The organization is just incapable of doing that consistently.
If units bought does not reflect this then they are better of being catered to by someone else.
Ever since the success of the iPhone made Apple a lifestyle company selling consumer electronics, organizational inertia has made high-end models more like more expensive consumer devices than tools designed for power users. Sometimes Apple makes deliberate effort to reverse the trend, like with the 2019 Mac Pro and 2021 MBP, but eventually the inertia wins again.
Use cases changes over time.
What we are witnessing is the same thing that happened when the microprocessor took over the mainframe/supercomputers.
The perception was the system that took a whole room and had lots of blinking lights had to be the more powerful. However, what was happening was that the microprocessor guys were integrating the same functionality that took lots of separate boards on a mainframe down to a few chips.
There were some very specific use cases where the mainframe had the edge, but for the 99% of the rest of the applications, we were ending up with system on our desktops that were faster than a computer who took a whole room. Heck, you can now buy a GPU for a $1k that is more powerful than the fastest supercomputer from 2000, which cost millions of dollars, took an entire floor in a datacenter, and used almost 1 megawatt.
The microprocessor vendors also had access to larger economies of scale, which meant they could spend more money in development of their designs/tech so they were able to overlap the old large system vendors who had slower development cycles and smaller revenues.
The same thing is now happening with SoCs. They are having larger levels of integration, so they can fit a whole PC into a single chip. Which means that things run faster, with less power, and less cost. And since they are leveraging the mobile/embedded markets that are larger and are growing faster than the traditional PC/datacenter stuff. The SoC vendors are the ones with access to the larger economies of scale. So they are developing things faster.
Which is why you end up with a mobile chip trading blows with a whole PC.
So you will see mobile SoCs getting more and more powerful at a faster rate than desktop microprocessors. And once they pass the inflection point, the desktop processor starts to actually lag in performance and can't catch up.
This has happened several times Mainframes -> Minicomputers -> Microcomputers -> SoCs... and it's usually correlated with jumps in levels of integration.
BTW, you still have old guys who come from the mainframe era still in denial of how a PC could possibly be faster ;-)
What I am trying to say in my lengthy short story is that perhaps the time of a Pro desktop like the Mac Pro has reduced the number of buyers over time as there are more modern alternatives to it. Sure there are some use cases that requires it but many other users have moved away from it.
Why else the development of the 2013 Mac Pro, 2017 iMac Pro and 2022 Mac Studio? Those SKUs saved a lot for the end user who wanted the power but not the bulk of the 2012 & 2019 Mac Pro.
That's just a weakness Apple has as an organization,
Apple's doing well for a company that briefly have a $3 trillion market cap within the last 52 weeks. This was nearly 10x what Steve Jobs was able to do in his lifetime.
much like Google's inability to continue supporting existing services.
Google keeps making experiments until shareholders demanded they stop throwing money at the wall in the hopes it sticks to it.
They keep having redundant projects compete with each other that leads to nothing.
