Their push to increase revenues on a per-unit basis as opposed to reaching more customers will leave them incredibly exposed when someone else finally comes along and builds a laptop that developers are happy with at a fraction of the cost of whatever the next gen-MBPs are priced at. It might not be next year, but they're not gonna be beloved forever if they keep this up.
You can get a lighter and much more powerful Lenovo or Dell laptop but not for what you would normally call a fraction.
And despite their good build quality, neither the masses nor the Mac complainers are buying XPS's or X1's. The reason is of course that they are neither universally better not significantly cheaper.
Apple is still by far the best at things that are hard to put on a spec sheet, while Lenovo and Dells spec sheets are kicking Apples ass.
And you are not going to see things change or a new player come in and take this market, because the market for laptops is shrinking. This is why apple is trying to increase revenue per unit and unit churn rate. Us premium laptop users are becoming a niche.
It of course came with Windows 10 and that's the rub, it's a crap shoot since I knew I'd be able to get Linux to work fine I just didn't know how much work (if any) would be required.
I was pleasantly surprised.