I can't believe I read through this whole thing finally.
Wow.
I've read similar complaints regarding the $3000 pricing premium between the Mac Pro and a similarly configured Mac Studio. Apple users complaining about Apple seems to be the third most certain thing right after death and taxes.
I have no expectations of changing anyone's mind around here, but I do want to leave my two cents for what it's worth.
I use my macs for video editing (1080p/4k of varying complexity), music/audio production, image editing, Apple ][ emulation (I still like using Appleworks for most of my writing, Scrivener. But what are the macs that I use for these tasks? Well call me crazy, but I prefer using my late 2005 2.0 Ghz Dual Core PowerMac G5 and my Early 2005 15" PowerBook G4. In the G5 I have upgraded the ram to max of 16GBs and put in two 1TB SSD's and put in a Radeon X1900 XT Mac Edition. The PowerBook has maxed out RAM at 2GB and a 120 GB SSD.
I also regularly use my M1 Mini that I purchased with 16 GB that I use for all the internet silliness that my other macs are too old to handle. Let me tell you 16GB on a G5 is way different than a 16GB on a modern mac.
I also use my Apple //e, the exact same one that I've owned since I was a kid, for serious writing. I'm writing my first novel entirely on this machine. I secretly suspect that of all my computers, this is the one with the greatest chance of outliving me. Maybe my kids will inherit it along with my cast iron pans.
If you're still reading, then you're probably wondering either what my point is, or why I would torture myself by not just moving everything to the MacMini since that would be the logical choice.
Here's the thing. If my old macs were still capable of providing a decent web experience on Leopard along with connecting to modern internet cloud services that I use, I would never have bought a modern Mac Mini. While there are certain features of Modern MacOS that I like (Dark Mode, multiple display handling, resizing windows from any side, finder tabs, reminders integration, control center), there is also a lot that just works better for me in Leopard. I prefer having Expose and Spaces like the way Leopard does it. The changes to the basic finder window made in Big Sur make it frequently obscure items in my toolbar. The recent remake of System Preferences into System Settings was and continues to be frustrating. Don't get me wrong, that System Preferences needed to be overhauled, but the overhaul should make things more logical in both categorization and nesting complexity of options. As far as widgets, Apple has yet to come close to the speed and convenience of Dashboard let alone surpass it. I was hopeful for Sonoma, but again disappointed.
I could have bought a cheap Windows box for all of my internet stuff, but I use a cheap Windows 10 box at work and my morality is against masochism.
So where was I going with this?
So back in the early 80's, the big 'Pro' customer that Apple was desperately trying to target were business professionals in offices needing to do word processing, database entry, and spread sheets. They had made some headway with the Apple ][ with apps like VisiCalc and Appleworks, but the PC happened and the Mac was largely seen as a toy until desktop publishing arrived, and even then it was relegated to the graphics department. Back then, these use cases were demanding and did push the computers of that era to their limits. Heck, the first so-called 'Pro' named product was probably the ProFile 5MB hard drive that could be used with either the Apple II line, Apple ///, or the Lisa. It was clearly aimed at office professionals or any professional that needed massive storage.
Now allow me to be a bit pedantic and split some hairs (not my hairs though, as they are long gone. That's why I'm wearing the hat. Why are you still reading this?!)
I think the 14" M3 MacBook Pro is the perfect machine for such office professionals. Think of a realtor. They probably use some kind of web-based CRM, need to take/upload photos and video of listings, need standard office productivity apps, if they work in a large firm, they might use Slack or some equivalent for interoffice communication. They may even need to give an occasional presentation. Now all of this can be done on a MacBook Air, but I can see where having the HDMI port, the SD card slot, the brighter display, and even the cooling fan would be a boon to this realtor even if they don't need more than the standard 8/256 configuration mode. Similar arguments could be made for a professor who mainly uses the web, Scrivener, PowerPoint/Keynote, and Word/Pages. I think such people are the real targets for this machine, and this machine is much better suited to them than the 13" MBP ever was. The major upside of the Air is the lower price and portability. Now is Apple going to come outright and say this laptop is for office professionals. No. Office work is uncool and totally not sexy, but music, video editing, and 3D modeling are sexy and aspirational uses cases for cool people that do well. Ironically this was thought of by marketing execs who aren't cool enough to do video ediitng of a music video modeled in 3D. I am not cool. I'm not even cool enough for marketing. I am a total dork. At least my wife loves me, though.
Now I can take a look at my own use cases. I plan to use my old PowerPC macs until they are absolutely as dead as my old Geocities webpage (remember those?) from back in the day. Don't ask me why I like them. They get out of my way when I use them for the work I do with them. They are both in a stable configuration that won't be broken in some way with the next update. When they inevitably go, I'm not sure if I will try to buy a laptop that I can do everything I use all of my macs for thus replacing everything except for the Apple //e that will outlive us all. Or do I buy a base-model studio for all of my multimedia production and then a cheap MBA for everything else? I don't know and I am in no hurry (i.e. financial condition) to make such decisions. My current status suits me fine.
However, I could spend $3k on the base model M1 Air and base Mac Studio, but I could also spend a comparable amount on the base 14" M3 Max MBP variant. If I do that, then I'll be tempted into thinking that if I get more seriously into video editing and want to take my work everywhere, then I'll need to buy more internal storage and ram since I would want to have this unit self-contained as much as possible so as to maintain its portability. So I would likely spend more and get a 48GB/1TB configuration at minimum. I'd probably regret not getting at least 2TB, otherwise I'll have to be constantly offloading older projects. So now on the MBP, I'm at $4099 in my configuration. With the Studio/MBA combo, internal storage doesn't matter as I would not need to edit on the MBA, so I could keep that base. Nor do I need more than 512GB for the Studio as I have a plethora of external storage that would be permanently attached to it. Each machine would be true to what it does best, and I wouldn't need to get suckered in by the ridiculous pricing for the upgrades.
Here's what I really don't understand after reading 32 pages of this thread. Why would anybody, no matter their financial condition or technical knowledge, not do any research as to what will best fit their needs when laying down thousands of dollars on a machine they need to do a job? After playing with Apple's pricing scheme, I quickly found a much better solution without allowing AAPL to price gouge me for it. For less than the price of the upgrades I would have had to put into buying one machine, I could buy two more specialized machines for their respective tasks. For the pricing of AAPL's upgrades, that M3 MBP better do my dishes. But not my cast iron skillets. I'll kill anyone or anything that messes up the seasoning on those.
PS This whole rambling nonsensical rant was typed and posted from my PowerBook G4.
