I couldn’t disagree more, mainly because you’re not taking R&D, die casting and other tooling, or margins into account.

The old unibody MacBook design is bought and paid for from an R&D standpoint. The tooling exists to build them. Keeping that model around as a budget model (as a “premium” company) doesn’t hurt Apple at all. It helps them because they probably have comparably high profit margins.

Same with the iPhone SE. It uses the same tooling the 5 and 5S used to build them. The design is paid for. So as. A budget-minded, entry level device, the margins probably look great on it.

When a company invests in a new product line or design it is an enormously expensive proposition. Multiple designs, multiple prototypes, testing, and then the cost of all the tooling to facilitate mass production. It is especially expensive for a company like Apple, since so many of their components are sourced from third party companies, who have the same sorts of expenses to account t for.

Keeping these older models around hurts nothing. And your “this is what it should look like” with the redesigned “iPhone 7 Mini” misses the point since it would require a huge investment to put into production, thereby undercutting it’s budget-minded standing.

Now, a time will come when they do introduce a redesigned model, and maybe at that time (next year perhaps) the SE will adopt a similar appearance to the up-range models, but that’s after it has proven itself as a product that there is a demand for.

Why do they keep selling MacBook Airs? Because the manufacturing costs are already paid for. They sell for $899 and $999 and up. The MacBook, which you believe should replace them starts at $1299 because that product line is in debt to the startup costs it required to be made.

Every new product any company ever introduces has a break-even point. That’s the number of units required to ship in order to offset the development expenses. The MacBook Pro, MacBook Airs, and iPhone SE are all well past that point because Apple has recycled older designs.

The new MacBook, all the Retina models, iPad Pro’s, iMac 5K, etc. are all still in the red in all likelihood.

These lower cost items that you feel should be dropped entirely or changed drastically bring in new customers. That’s what a price point does. Especially when you consider what the competition is doing. Why get a chunky old-style MBP for $1099 when you can get a generic Windows 10 laptop for $349?

Because some people want to use Apple’s software.

Now, drop that. Drop all the products you advocate dropping… No more older gen MBP, no more Airs, no more nonRetina iMacs… The products still in the lineup would have a starting price of $1299 for laptops and $1499 for desktops.

Do you not understand that a lot of the lower priced options serve educational institutions and/or lower income people? You can’t just take those options away from them and expect them to make up the difference ($300–400) to get the newer model.

And if your Apple dumping a billion dollars a year into R&D can’t just lower the prices on the newer products either and expect to remain as profitable as they’ve been over the past decade.

It’s already being observed that the iPhone is losing profitability in part due to competition and market saturation. The iPad is struggling to, again market saturation. If Apple cut it’s margins across all product lines they wouldn’t have the resources to do what they do ten years from now. Your plans would be disastrous from a business perspective.