Oddly enough, none of these tech bloggers compared Apple's Grand Stand to a Windows 10 Server standard license, which costs a grand just for a software license copy that costs Microsoft nothing to create. Perhaps Apple should give away the hardware and charge pro users a license fee for the intellectual property that went into designing it. Then it could also charge client access licenses per person who touches the thing. That would be so much easier for consumers to understand, and so much more lucrative for Apple.



Instead, bloggers like IGN Executive Editor Josh Norem compared it to a Playstation 4 with a consumer gaming TV and some video games. Really, why make movies or create soundtracks when you can play Spiderman?

Thousands vs millions

Beyond the qualitative aspect of pro-class hardware, there's also another factor: scale. High-end cameras, displays, and their accessories are very expensive not only because they are "better," but also because they are serving a smaller audience.



There are fewer potential pro users to bring the prices of their equipment down. Limited production runs are more expensive to build, distribute, and sell. That's an entirely different business from the consumer market that Apple has typically served.



From the Macintosh to iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and HomePod, Apple's consumer products have often appeared to be premium, expensive products. The reality, however, was that Apple was taking very expensive technology and making it much more affordable by creating a mass-market product that could build and sell by the millions. Working in that volume brought the price down due to economies of scale.



A major component of Apple's high volume production of iPhone, iPad, HomePod, Apple Watch, and Apple TV has been the development of Apple's own proprietary silicon. While extremely expensive to design, once the cost is spread across the hundreds of millions of devices Apple sells, this custom silicon ends up as an extremely valuable differentiator that enables the company to build more advanced products and lower cost.

The delicate balance

Every year, Apple has been able to sell the previous year's iPhone at a significant discount because the perpetual push toward more advanced technology also helped previous generations of components become cheaper to build. Google has shifted its weight back and forth in consumer gear, pushing advanced Honeycomb tablets that were more expensive than iPad, then trying cheaper Nexus tablets, then going back to premium-priced gear. That hasn't worked out well.



Apple has maintained a much more stable focus on what it has tried to sell. Rather than boiling prices of PCs and phones down to the cheapest possible price tiers, Apple has maintained a target on a sweet spot in pricing that allows it to deliver better technology with more fit and finish integration, smarter software, higher-quality screen calibration, better quality audio, and more advanced features and security protections. This has established Apple with a more trusted brand than any other mass-market consumer electronics maker.



That's a very delicate balance to maintain perfectly over time. In some cases it appears Apple has pushed too hard and too fast, resulting in ideas that didn't work out as expected. For example, the push to make Thunderbolt the main connectivity protocol worked pretty well for MacBook Pros, but wasn't as well-received as a solution for the 2013 Mac Pro, necessitating a return to a larger tower with more PCIe slots and extra power and bandwidth allocations. The butterfly keyboard design that was created to deliver an ultra-slim Retina MacBook introduced unanticipated new problems of its own. Incremental fixes helped, but Apple ultimately moved to a new keyboard design to deliver the level of quality and performance it wanted to offer.



In software, Apple has worked to balance the demands for faster support for new features, for feature-parity and compatibility with other systems, and its efforts to deliver differentiating features such as secure Touch ID, Augmented Reality, Metal graphics, computational photography, and support for powerful gestures. Yet when these improvements—and the foundational changes that support them—aren't managed perfectly, users experience interruptions, bugs, instability, and security flaws.



This year's macOS Catalina and iOS 13 were both widely regarded as noticeably less reliable and stable than previous releases. The obvious solution is to hold back progress, but that in itself is also a problem. When Apple held back advertised features such as iCloud Drive sharing, the complaints were about as bad as if it had released unfinished features in perpetual beta in the model of Google—or perhaps even worse.



A similar engineering decision exists in the area of deciding what new markets Apple expands its efforts into. Does it dump out a more confusing, duplicative range of new products on consumers, from even larger phones to even smaller tablets? Does it start making TVs? Does it create $200 HomePods to rival the tide of $30 loss leaders from Amazon? Does it create $10,000 to $20,000 pro workstations that could only possibly sell to an audience of perhaps hundreds of thousands of professionals capable of earning a profit from high-end gear? What if that requires building accessories too expensive for the typical iPhone user?



Apple's loudest critics are nearly always on the wrong side of reality. It's not because they are bad people. It's just because they don't know anything.