Given Apple’s current locked-down trajectory with the Mac, the Mac Pro was gonna die eventually, and it’s for the best that it does given it was reduced to little more than a massively overpriced Mac Studio grafted onto a useless PCIe backplane; a $12k grift, basically.
PCs at least are still modular and expandable; for now.
Some businesses have that genetic ideological backbone that defines what they can and can’t do with good results.
In case of Apple - at some point they were a “cheaper and better for home users, but less serious and more toyish” computer company in their advertising and, well, quality. And in some sense this seems to have carried through from the 90s till now, as their equilibrium.
And honestly when in the 90s they were gradually becoming something more luxury, that was already a mistake. Then Jobs came with the NeXT purchase, and, of course, with Apple’s financial situation then it was probably the only way to survive to further go in that direction.
It actually made me optimistic about that company to read rumors about them preparing to go for lower market with another laptop model in 2026.
Because the world has changed, and I’d say not only Mac Pro is a suitcase without handle, I’d also say the same about iMacs. If they are not making an extensible stationary machine, then having a few laptop lines (cheap light, good light, powerful heavier) and a stationary line (well, Mac Mini and Mac Studio seem that, stationary normal and stationary powerful) is optimal. Since each line means expenses and different components and separate advertising.
It sort of feels as if they were returning to the roots. Perhaps they feel that they are stalled or losing in the mobile market, and same with the luxury market - their cult offensive was impressive, but it’s wearing out. While with desktops they have a chance at rapid expansion.
In no world has Apple ever been the cheaper option
The Mac Classic was the first Mac to sell for under $1k, and the ‘LC’ acronym stood for ‘Low-cost Color,’ that said IIRC even back then there were PC clones that were cheaper than the at-the-time cheapest Macs, and that were actually expandable to boot even if they didn’t ship with better specs out the box. Also, the Mac Classic still shipped with a 68k and 1MB RAM, maxing out at 4MB. In 1990. When the 486 had been out for a year and the 386 had been out for five years, and I’m pretty sure PCs were shipping with more than 1MB RAM by then.
Even within Apple’s own lineup at the time, the original Mac LC shipped with an '020 vs. the Classic’s 68k.
Additionally IIRC the Apple IIc was sold as a cheaper variant of the Apple II line.
Being the “low cost Mac” is very different from being the cheapest option.
Though I’ll say that my one Mac purchase in the early 00’s was a few years after they switched to OSX and I bought a Macbook Pro for probably 60%+ more than the equivalent PC but it lasted me over 2X as long as any PC ever had prior. Plus the free OS upgrades that were unheard of on Windows machines at the time.
Their advertising pressed differently in early 90s.