The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.

In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.

Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.

A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.

A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.

The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.

Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.

Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.

Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.

Also as we have seen, the Chinese labs will just buy their kit through cut outs or do training in locations where there's no embargo.

Power density and all of the problems that are fallout from high power density. A modern LiPoly battery contains a lot of energy. It's stored in a chemical that is highly reactive with oxygen, which you happen to be surrounded by at the moment.

Watch some videos on lithium battery fires. Not only do they have extremely hot flames but they spray out molten bits of battery and can't be extinguished with water.

To make a LiPoly battery that can be safely handled by normal people it needs a strong outer casing. A sealed battery in a phone uses the phone's case itself as the battery's protective casing. A user replaceable battery would need its own strong case. The phone then needs to be larger to accommodate the extra volume or have a smaller battery which stores less power than a sealed battery of equivalent volume.

The market has rewarded thinner phones with long lifetimes but also high performance. That triple point is challenging if not impossible to hit without sealed batteries.

I can see them not releasing an M6 Ultra but no reason not to see Pro and Max versions of the M6.

Enterprise sales sucks. There's infinite amounts of politicking and glad handing and buyers will get all sorts of sweet brib..."sales dinners" then go with the cheapest option. Margins on hardware sucks and the only money is in support contracts. Apple instead invests in consumer sales/support primarily and all the other channels are side businesses.

Stuff like the Xserve existed mostly for Apple internal purposes and ended up being sold externally to goose the scale enough to make them not a huge loss. At one point a large percentage of the offices on Bubb road were packed with Xserves running portions of the iTunes Music Store and the Apple online store. More offices were packed with Xserves doing media ingest and encoding for iTMS. Just about every building had racks of them as build and file servers.

Used to favor the US. Trump's policies and behaviors are ruining the US' reputation as a stable trading partner by demonstrating what damage can be done by an idiot with unchecked power. The rest of the world is going to permanently veer away from US services because it's not impossible (and sadly likely) another feckless imbecile will get put in charge.

While an older M-series might run a matmul or dot product kernel just fine the M5 can run them much faster.