US smartphone market? It's growing every year even with huge margins, lowering the price would accelerate this pace.
LLM hardware market? Like really, what is the incremental cost for 8gb to 16gb to 32gb to 64gb to 128gb for their macbooks? The could probably shave a few grand off the 128gb and still make a decent profit. Now you have 128gb unified memory macbook going for almost the same price as a rtx 4090 with a computer (and with only 24gb vram). That means a huge shift in hobbyist developers who will turn all their focus to ML with macbooks (e.g. MXL vs Nvidia/cuda). and if they do this with new macbooks, suddenly the market for older slower macbooks collapses, leading to much higher demand and even more hobbyists albeit with slower Cpus/less ram.
It sucks but apple laptop cpus and mobile cpus dominate anything else out there. I wish there were more competition. And their margins are massive.