But the bottom is where volume and profits are. If the PC market has shown us anything, it’s that only producing for the top of the market gets you outcompeted.
Sure. But it’s a lot easier to pay back your investment in product development if you can amortise it over 50.000.000 GPUs instead of 50.000 GPUs. Same for ironing out the bugs in your software.
Getting paid a small yearly salary for every one of your products may look really nice but the size of the market makes it a precarious business.
No, the profits are not in the volume. See the profitability vs. volume of iOS vs. Android. Ultimately, Nvidia charges a lot of mid-range cards because they don't have any competition. If Nvidia did have competition, they could lower the price of their midrange cards to stifle Intel while still profiting on the high end.
Midrange cards subsidize the higher end cards because they are often chips that were meant to be a tier or two higher but didn't pass QC at those performance levels. If you take a price hit on that, your entire fab/process is less profitable overall because you're not able to recover as much revenue from less than ideal yield.
Intel competing in the midrange is far from a nothingburger.
We obviously remember this time differently. Most people I knew had PCs, the few that had Macs had only one thing in common: Enough money to afford one.
The only other place where I saw a considerable number of Mac deployments was university. So portraying it as a niche product for media people has some truth in it but is in my opinion far from the whole truth.
But the bottom is where volume and profits are. If the PC market has shown us anything, it’s that only producing for the top of the market gets you outcompeted.