I think you’re onto something. This system might cater to movie makers or high-end creatives, but in science from all I can tell Apple is done in terms of workstations. You’ll still see loads of MBPs and some people use a mini or an iMac for desktop work. But in terms of number crunching and real scientific computing, it’s usually all Linux on generic iron these days. Apple’s last stronghold there was scientific visualization and that’s dying too now that Apple has determined that GPUs are solely geared towards FCP. Many years ago Apple gave up the Xserve (of which we had several dozen here in our department alone), then they screwed up the MP with the trash can’s poor design followed by years of neglect, and now together with the continued refusal to provide for CUDA on macOS they’re making sure they will be left out while science moves on to embrace big data & ML. Eventually they’ll probably kill X11 support (uncool and too technical) or an ARM transition (hey, it works for iPad) will kill off simple porting of Linux x86 binaries and then they’ll really be kicked out.
It’s a shame that Macs in science are being relegated to basically (shiny) netbook status. They’re still popular as heck notebooks, but their use is essentially for office work and manuscript writing. Actual scientific computing happens on other boxes people connect remotely too. Code can be developed and debugged on such systems too, no need to do that on a Mac. Kind of a local small scale netbook/cloud implementation relegating the Mac to a dumb terminal conduit to where the real action happens. Lab equipment control and scientific computing on Mac used to be really strong but are becoming increasingly rare (and often it’s just legacy). A shame really. Apple had a great run in edu and science. But I guess these days that’s no longer cool. It’s been a while since top Apple execs had actual academic experience and understood what really counts in the lab.
And all of this I observe at UC Berkeley, where we’ve traditionally always been very Apple friendly.