Over the past few months, I’ve written chapter and verse about why I do not use an iPad very much. In contrast, my wife, Barbara, sticks to hers like glue. She is never far from it, and often has it in her hands when she’s walking around the house doing various chores. Or she places it nearby.

To her, it’s an indispensable tool for managing email, and for checking her Facebook account. In her spare time, she’s an animal rights activist. For such purposes, her iPad is essential. Her iPhone 5c is less suitable, since she has vision problems and only uses it for phone calls.

In contrast, I have no real use for one right now, and only work with it to help her fix a problem. It’s not that I object to tablets and all, but I can do mobile stuff on my iPhone. The iPad’s larger display ought to make it easier to manage email and write articles such as this, but I just turn to my iMac for such tasks.

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Apple spent a surprising amount of time talking about Macs at last week’s WWDC. No, not just macOS High Sierra, but in introducing new hardware, and talking about forthcoming products. While Apple normally doesn’t say much about future gear, this time they couldn’t stop talking; well, mostly.

But that doesn’t mean we have the full roadmap.

Yes, we know that an iMac Pro — an iMac with workstation features that starts at $4,999 — will ship in December. Well, perhaps it’ll be like the 2013 Mac Pro, in which a few will leave the factory, but most won’t show up in your hands until early in 2018.

There will be a new Mac Pro in our future. Apple continues to promise something modular that will probably arrive next year, along with a replacement for the now-departed Thunderbolt display. You can certainly speculate heavily about what will be done. More than likely, the parts used in the 2018 Mac Pro will resemble the iMac Pro, but maybe it’ll offer the 22-core Intel Xeon as an option along with other enhancements. No doubt it’ll be easy to add and remove stuff inside, and perhaps Apple will demonstrate the ease of upgrading at a media event. Since that has become such an important issue, I suspect Apple won’t let down its remaining pro users.

The display? Well, they could have delivered a 5K monitor last year. Instead, they ceded that opportunity to LG. So where does Apple go next? 8K to support the new generation of high-resolution digital movie cameras, or 10K to allow you to view such fare at full resolution, with space to edit in a new version of Final Cut Pro X?

But the last two paragraphs are mostly speculation. Lots of products were upgraded, and we have a few basics on what’s to come. With one exception.

What’s going to happen to the Mac mini?

The Mac mini arrived early in 2005. At $499, it was the cheapest Mac ever, although input devices and monitors were optional. By the time the Intel version arrived the following year, I suspect lots of Mac users — or Windows switchers — bought them as a great way to run macOS on the cheap.

Over the next few years, the Mac mini even found a home in datacenters for use as cheap servers. For a time, purely as an experiment, I used one to run all of my sites. It did a pretty good job of it, but it is not built for heavy-duty 24/7 use, so I went back to a Linux blade server. Indeed, that’s how I set up the Mac mini, with a virtual machine that ran Linux and a web app known as cPanel.

Originally upgrades were possible but difficult. You needed a putty knife or a similar implement to open the case, and if you wanted to replace the drive, it required lots of fiddling with the delicate innards. Apple delivered a $599 version that allowed you to quickly remove the bottom cover to replace RAM. Other parts were sort of accessible.

With the 2014 revision, the Mac mini’s price returned to its original level, at $499. In exchange for paying $100 less, Apple removed the ability to replace RAM. As with Mac notebooks, it was soldered onto the logic board. Worse, there were no more configurations with quad-core Intel silicon. It was all dual-core. Even the top-of-the-line, and Apple never explained why they delivered a refresh that made a product worse.

Indeed, I checked the choices still being offered by one web host, and I see that they are still offering 2012 Mac minis with quad-core CPUs in addition to a few dual-core 2014 models.

Today, the Mac mini is a forgotten Mac even though it remains on the price lists. We are assured that the Mac Pro will receive a major upgrade, but Apple’s cheapest Mac remains untouched.

Apple marketing VP Philip Schiller, when asked about the fate of the Mac mini during that early April roundtable with a handful of tech reporters, said, “On that I’ll say the Mac mini is an important product in our lineup and we weren’t bringing it up because it’s more of a mix of consumer with some pro use. So we’re focusing today specifically on the things that are important to pros. While there are some pro usage, there’s also a lot of consumer uses so we aren’t covering it today. The Mac mini remains a product in our lineup, but nothing more to say about it today.”

If it’s an “important product,” surely that means Apple wants to satisfy customers who have been waiting patiently (or not-so-patiently) for an upgrade, right? So where does Apple take it? Don’t forget that the current design was intended, originally, to include an optical drive and was sized accordingly. Without that constraint, now, all bets are off on future design directions.

If the form factor doesn’t change, though a basic parts refresh could have happened by now. Add Kaby Lake processors, restore a quad-core option, and perhaps allow you to upgrade RAM again.

Or does Apple have something more in mind? Well, if it was going to inherit some more professional options, in the spirit of the HP Z2 Mini workstation, wouldn’t that have been announced at the WWDC? What’s Apple’s game plan anyway? Or is there something in the works for this fall to give the Mac mini a new lease on life?

So maybe Apple will include it at the end of a media event for the HomePod — and perhaps a Mac Pro preview — this fall, demonstrating how the Mac mini can function as a home media server. Or something. But that statement from Schiller certainly conveys the impression that Apple isn’t going to give it up, or maybe he was just putting us off, and hoping we won’t notice if it quietly disappears from the price lists. For now, I’ll take Schiller at his word, however, that the Mac mini remains an “important product.”

I’m often amazed how polarizing the issue of Apple’s pricing policies can become. The conventional wisdom is usually that anything with an Apple label on it is overpriced. It has to be, considering the company takes huge profits from sales. So where are the cheap iPhones, iPads, and Macs?

And how dare Apple consider charging an exorbitant $349 for the forthcoming AirPod? Did Apple executives succumb to the “greed is good” mantra from the 1987 movie, “Wall Street?”

As is usual in such cases, the truth is not a black and white issue, but one immersed in shades of gray.

So, yes, Apple earns high profits from most of the product categories in which it plays. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Are customers overpaying because Apple wants to report high margins in its quarterly financials? Or are they getting fair value for a fair price?

Take the iPhone. Apple has traditionally earned over 90% of the profits in the industry. Most of the rest goes to Samsung, meaning that many companies barely earn any profit from the gear they sell, even if the quantities are in the tens of millions.

Apple sells high-end smartphones. Even though Samsung sells the cheap stuff, the flagship Galaxy S8 and the S8+ are in the same price tiers as iPhones. Does that make all these handsets expensive, or is it just, as I said, charging fair prices for such gear?

It’s hard to argue the Apple Watch, since there are few direct competitors, those with mostly similar features. But anyone who says the Apple Watch, with its current sales numbers, is a failure, has to explain why the Amazon Echo, which sells in far fewer numbers, is a rousing success.

But the most intensive pricing argument has been about the Mac. It’s never ending. How can Apple possibly charge $999 for its cheapest notebook, the MacBook Air, while you can get a perfectly serviceable Windows notebook for hundreds of dollars less? How does Apple have the temerity to ask $4,999 for the forthcoming iMac Pro? And that’s for the entry-level model.

Indeed, some speculate that a fully decked out iMac Pro will probably cost upwards of $17,000!

Overpriced? Not exactly. During its keynote, Apple claimed that rival PC hardware, with similar specs, cost over $7,000. Some people went ahead and assembled do-it-yourself configurations, and ended up with prices in the $4,999 range, give or take a few hundred dollars.

Understand that these configurations are based on separates, a computer and a standalone 5K display. They also use current parts, not the ones that will be in the iMac Pro, since they may not even be out yet. So actual pricing is, at best, a guess. But I’ll assume new parts will be priced in the same range, or higher, than current chips. I’m not sure about the AMD Radeon Pro Vega graphics chips that Apple uses, since there is no price set for a PC version yet. The Vega family includes high-end gaming GPUs, so they won’t come cheap.

The other argument is that Apple charges too much for extra RAM, bigger SSDs and other enhancements, but when you compare its pricing to mainstream PC makers, the differences are not significant. Unless Apple pulls a fast one, however, you should be able to use third-party ECC error-correcting RAM on the iMac Pro, and thus save hundreds of dollars on high-end configurations. But since nothing else can be easily removed, you’ll have to put up with Apple’s price choices. But it would be nice if the SSDs can be swapped out too.

To be fair, the upgrade scheme can only be based on the regular 27-inch iMac at this point. That means it’ll get a low repairability score from iFixit unless Apple believes pros would prefer more control over upgrades in exchange for the higher prices they’ll pay. It’s not impossible to do.

What this appears to indicate is that, at the very least, Apple isn’t overcharging for the iMac Pro, or at least doesn’t seem to be. I expect you’ll be able to reach a similar conclusion when the Mac Pro arrives, presumably next year.

When it comes to regular Apple gear, the iMac is perfectly compatible for its price point. Just consider the price of a standalone 5K display and you’ll see what I mean.

You can make a more compelling argument about Mac notebooks. But even then, the Mac either has features that aren’t duplicated on a PC — such as the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar — or are at least priced in roughly the same range as similarly outfitted PCs.

But remember that the purchase price of a computer isn’t just what you pay at the store. There’s also the cost of upkeep, how much it requires for baby sitting and repairs over its useful life. According to IBM, which has bought tens of thousands of Macs for its employees, the cost of ownership is hundreds of dollars less. That’s where the rubber meets the road.

The other issue seldom considered is productivity, and how it compares between macOS and Windows. I suppose if you’re just using the same or similar apps, and not dealing with too many system functions beyond opening, saving and printing, there’s not a huge amount of difference. At least until the Windows PC misbehaves, and that still appears to happen more often than with Macs. But don’t take my word for it. Pay heed, instead, to the cost-of-ownership factor as reported by IBM.

A key reason why the pace of Mac hardware updates has slowed in recent years can be placed in the hands of Intel. As they fell behind releasing new silicon, Apple was left without the parts they needed to do proper refreshes. True, Apple did allow the Mac to languish way beyond the release of new Intel parts.

Now consider the 2016 MacBook Pro. The critics pounced on Apple’s perceived lapses. So why didn’t it support 32GB RAM, even though no previous Mac notebook supported more than 16GB? Even the Microsoft Surface, with which they are compared, doesn’t have that support.

So I won’t get into the oft-repeated reasons. Let’s just say that a future Intel chipset might well provide such support without compromises, so maybe it’ll happen with the 2018 MacBook Pros.

The other argument was that Apple failed to use the latest Intel chips, known as Kaby Lake. Once again, some critics overlooked the fact that they weren’t shipping in quad-core versions last fall; they are now. So the MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac received appropriate updates last week.

You might have seen the early benchmarks. The performance boost of the new gear is in the low double digits. It may not sound like much, but after single digit increases in recent years, it’s a revelation. Macworld reported Geekbench results that reveal a single core improvement of 16%, and a multicore improvement of 19%.

That takes us to this year’s iPad Pro refresh, with Apple’s A10X Fusion chip. It’s an interesting design, with six cores, three of which operate at high power, and three of which operate at low power to improve battery life. The GPU has 12 cores.

But none of that matters, except how it impacts performance. Here, performance for single core tasks is 30% faster than the previous version, according to Apple. For multicore tasks, it’s 82% faster.

More to the point, Apple claims that the new iPads are “more powerful than most PC laptops.” Intel take note!

Forget about other ARM-based tablets from Samsung and other companies. If you compare the benchmarks for a 2017 iPad Pro against a MacBook, it’s a lot faster. Compared to last year’s MacBook Pro, it comes close in single core tests, although multicore tests reveal a wider performance gulf.

But you have to put some conditions on such results. One article I read that includes such a comparison didn’t bother to mention how much faster the 2017 MacBook Pro runs. But consider that Intel has been building microprocessors since 1971. Although AMD tries to be the scrappy competitor, a healthy majority of personal computers still use Intel silicon. While Apple has used other chips throughout its history, it joined the crowd in 2006 with the very first Intel-based Macs.

In contrast, Apple’s first in-house chip, the A4, based on the ARM architecture, came out in 2010. So Apple has been releasing A-series chips for seven years, and is now building parts that provide performance that exceeds or competes with notebook computers with Intel inside. The rapid run-up in power is a reason why some suggest that Apple ditch Intel and put ARM inside Macs.

Now there are reasons why what sounds good on paper may not sound good when you look at the whole picture. Even if Apple makes it easy to port Intel apps to ARM, there will have to be a period where older apps run in emulation; in other words slower. One key advantage of Apple moving to Intel was to allow you to run Windows on a Mac at full speed in Boot Camp, and with pretty decent performance via a virtual machine. A lot of people use Macs as dual-OS machines; I do.

Now Apple may find a way to make its A-series chips powerful enough to emulate Intel without a noticeable speed drop. Maybe you’ll be able to run Windows that way too. Migrating from one processor family to another will entail a fair amount of pain, even if you can do the basics with a little pointing and clicking in Xcode. Developers will still have to do a fair amount of compatibility and performance tuning to make their apps run at full efficiency.

Apple says it won’t happen. So it appears that the closest you’ll get will be the use of A-series chips for low-power functions, such as the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. There are reports that the Power Nap feature may also get similar treatment, but it’ll never the whole widget.

Still, the fact that Apple can beat most mobile chips from Intel in seven short years has to be a miracle. Sure, Apple has the advantage of being able to optimize its silicon to meet the needs of just three operating systems — iOS, watchOS and tvOS. The number of models supported is also relatively small. This allows Apple to take shortcuts, and not worry about functions it doesn’t need.

In contrast, Intel needs to meet the needs of numerous manufacturers with thousands and thousands of different configurations. Embedded in those Core and Xeon chips are all sorts of legacy functions that have to  accounted for. No doubt having many masters means less efficiency.

But if you consider the pace of growth, it won’t be long before Apple’s chips speed way beyond the best Intel has to offer. Even if the Mac doesn’t make another processor switch, a future iPad or a convergence computer of some sort may do things far quicker than you might expect. Do you remember how slow those original iPads were?