Maybe they should though. A lot of people buy a laptop just to only ever use it on their desk and never actually take it anywhere. A desktop computer with equivalent performance will generally be several hundred dollars cheaper and run quieter as well.
Have you actually looked at the price of pre-built desktops lately?
Check out all the big computer manufacturers like Dell and HP. Go to their “cheap desktops” section (e.g., Dell Inspiron).
Focusing on Dell, the cheapest one I see is $499 and the specs are a 13th gen i5, Intel UHD 730, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD. Bring your own monitor!
For laptops, the Inspiron 15 for $430 gets you 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 11th gen core i5, Iris Xe graphics.
Why am I buying that desktop instead of the laptop? What is my motivation?
Look at Apple and the Mac mini will save you $400 over a MacBook Air but you’ll need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and webcam/microphone.
In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air, and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.
Desktops just don’t have a price advantage because nobody wants them, so there’s no economy of scale.
> Look at Apple and the Mac mini will save you $400 over a MacBook Air but you’ll need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and webcam/microphone.
Yes, that's who the Mac mini is primarily targeted at--PC users that want a Mac but don't want to spend a lot of money and who have a keyboard, mouse and display.
> In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air…
It takes a lot to actually get any Apple Silicon Mac with a fan to make enough sound to actually be heard. If you read the reviews for the Mac mini, nobody has ever said fan noise was an issue because they never heard any.
> and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.
Also not accurate.
Because desktops have more room, you can get more cores (both CPU and GPU) and run them faster (and therefore hotter) than you can in a laptop. The fact the M-series chips came from the iPhone's A-series has nothing to do with performance. A $499 M2 Mac mini has 4 performance CPU cores and 8 GPU cores while a $1,199 iPhone 14 Pro Max has 2 performance CPU cores and 5 GPU cores. That's the beauty of ARM: it scales from phones to laptops to servers.
If you need more storage, you can get 8 TB in a Mac mini, while the MacBook Air maxes out at 2 TB.
The Mac mini has always been the workhorse of the Mac line and hasn't changed. Just going from Intel to ARM made the Mac mini a no-brainer replacement for the old Intel Mac Pros, which were the poster children for loud desktop computers.
I wish Apple disclosed individual product line sales because I think they would show that I am right and you are wrong ;-)
I don't think the Mac mini is the workhorse or a strong seller of the Mac lineup; it's just a convenient little niche to keep around.
Regarding performance advantage: When Apple was on Intel, Intel's SKUs had way more of a wattage/thermal difference between their product lines: The 16" MacBook Pro was sucking down 100 watts while my current 14" MacBook Pro can stay charged on an iPhone charging brick.
So when you look at a Mac Mini at $600 having a handful of extra cores over a $1000 MacBook Air, it's like, "yes, it's technically faster," but not "I'm going to be able to enable new workflows with this additional performance."
If you can play a game or edit a video or browse the web on a Mac mini, you'll be able to do the exact same thing on a MacBook Air and, as a generally subjective human, not notice any difference in capability or speed. This was not the case when Apple was selling 12" MacBooks that felt miserably slow editing a Word document new out of the box.
Regarding storage: That 8TB upgrade is only available on the top-tier Mac mini, and choosing it brings you to $3699. Choose the lowest tier MacBook Pro 14" with that same storage upgrade and for $4399 and you get the exact same processor with the exact same performance (not thermally limited), and on top of that you get a 120Hz mini-LED high DPI display, keyboard, trackpad, webcam, battery, and all the convenience that a laptop gets you.
What person with nearly $4000 to spend on a system is going to choose not to have a laptop for less than 20% more money when they don't even lose even a single digit percent of performance? It's not like the Mac mini is internally expandable or upgradable at all.
