I feel like Mac Pro purchasers also have an accompanying MacBook Pro and iPhone and are more entwined in the ecosystem than the typical user.
Frustrating those people likely comes with a risk of losing high value customers.
I think it’s similar to the model a lot of game consoles have. They make little to negative profit on the console itself during the first couple years, but make it up on software and other benefits of hardware lock-in.
> They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line.
In the time after the trashcan Mac Pro they lost a significant portion of the professional market. And while that market is relatively small, it's highly influencial.
By the time Final Cut Pro X was unveiled Apple could boast that 60% of Hollywood movies are edited on a Mac. Now? Not so much. And this probably extends into other areas, too.
Indeed. Releasing FCP X as an MVP (a concept no-one outside of software dev understands), without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect, was a bad idea. I know a couple of filmmakers that switched to PC, partly due to the cost of Macs but also because of FCP X.
The question is how they will pay for a high-end chip when they no longer can rely on Intel to spread out the development cost among many customers.