> I sincerely doubt a model variant costs hundreds of millions either, or the majority of the laptop market would be unsustainable. Yeah, but the majority of t

> I sincerely doubt a model variant costs hundreds of millions either, or the majority of the laptop market would be unsustainable. Yeah, but the majority of the laptop market aren't doing brain-damaged things like removing ESC keys, adding pointless touchbars and designing keyboards which are beautiful to look at but which fail at actual typing. And the majority of the laptop market don't have to pay for Sir Jonathan Ive to remove all colour, ornament, affordance and delight from the design, moving as close to a featureless white rounded-rectangular prism as possible as he can for this iteration. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple have to pay an order of magnitude (or two) per model, just to end up with something which is ultimately sub-par.