Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.

The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.

Not sure about the "cheap shit" part, there are no other laptops with the build quality of MacBooks. It is as premium as it gets.

Software has gotten shittier tho, but I think it is an overall trend and not just Apple.

I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.