...
Couldn't one think that the introduction of Apple Silicon indeed presses Apple to crank up sales?
Pressed to crank up sales of the Mini ? No.
Apple Silicon (AS) large differentiating wins are primarily going to come in the space of battery power systems. Is Apple likely to sell a couple million more laptops? Yes. Does that increase ( press) Apple to expand the Mac Mini sales to make up for lost sales volume. Absolutely not.
If Apple increases overall Mac sales units volume with the AS intro to the product line then there won't be "pressed" at all. When folks are buying there is less pressure; not more.
To get a broader ASi user base as quickly as possible?
Which is mostly laptops. The Mac product unit skew now is well over 65% laptops. If Apple doesn't make a rapid laptop transition then they are in very bad shape. But if they do make a transition that cranks up the laptop volume.... then the quirky in a corner Mini product doesn't matter much as it did before in 2005-7 .
If Mini's represented 45-70% of all desktop sales Apple might be "pressed" to do something about lowering the cost of a Mini. The iMac is the primary desktop volume driver. If Apple screws that system up then there is a substantive problem with the transition ( mostly in the second "half" of the period).
The Mini's were introduced in 2005 in part to stop gap the "decline" of desktops.
Everyone knows the PC market has been in decline for the past few years. But one segment of that market is doing spectacularly well, and one company has managed to carve out enviable sales and profits by dominating that niche. Guess who?
www.zdnet.com
The folks at Apple in charge of strategy at Apple are not jumping out of bed every morning thinking cranking desktops unit sales to the highest levels possible is "job number one" . That graph ends in 2012. It is probably even more skewed now. AS will likely just reinforce the same trend lines as before.
The Mini has gone comatose between 2011 - 2014 and 2014 - 2018. In part because it is not a substantively "move the needle" for the overall Mac product line in terms of units or revenue. It has always been a small gap filler.
And wouldn't in this case a rather cheap Mac mini, along with a new MBA, be the best way to get there?
A cheaper MBA would be more effective.
Virtual lessons take a hit before the school year begins.
www.tomshardware.com
(No idea if
thinks this way but iPhone SE 2020 at least doesn't falsify that concept.)
Apple needed the SE 2020 to do better penetration into a broader set of worldwide economies. Apple had priced themselves out of places like India and select countries that still have room for substantive market expansion to smarter-phones. Apple got lucky in that folks dropping out of highest priced smartphones also dropped in "first world" economies with the pandemic. Couple that with the rise in quality of mid-range phones from multiple players ( Motorola G, OnePlus , Google Pixel mid 'a' variants (picking up where Nexus used to have leverage ) , Samsung , Hwawei , Xiaomi, etc. )
The SE 2020 is just Apple incrementally moving off the notion that selling a 3 year old phone was OK at $300-500 price levels. Apple's phone strategy has mainly been sell last year's phone cheaper and sell last, last year's cheaper still with even older stuff in it. The 2020 model at least puts a modern A-series SoC in the model.
The iPhones is bad because Apple has pushed the starting point of the iPhones much higher. Now the "bargain year old" phone is close to where the 3rd-4th generation "leading edge" iPhones used to sell at. The price creep there has been relatively way larger than the Mini price creep increase.
Is the Mini (with everything soldered down ) going to be a "great" computer in developing countries? Probably not as much as the "box with slots and low cost technician repair" is bigger chasm there for Apple to cross.
