Can they? Yes.
Would they? Unlikely.
It's a niche market device, it's not something normal folks walks into an Apple Store or electronics store to look for every day. Your R&D supply chain etc investments are way better off spent elsewhere. You might say if Apple makes it people would buy it, but Wacom is charging $2,499.95 for just a 24" model...how much do you think Apple would charge if they come out with such a device?
It's really about does it make business sense to do so.
Just to imagine such a device in an Apple Store, you have to visualize the crowd of people lined up to get hands on it. A device of this kind arouses enormous charm, precisely because of the creative potential it has and at the same time for the flexibility of use and the convenience of use. In practice, one would do what one wants and it would be instinctive, that is, without having to learn how, because the access routes to the same practice would be at the user's choice.
If you see it only as a professional medium, I will direct it to the creative professional, I agree with you that it is certainly more niche, even if I don't know how much, because even a creative professional, being able to choose to invest in a single device, instead of many, divided and certainly less powerful individually, compared to a workstation that can do everything, choose that and therefore the numbers widen a lot.
But in any case if you apply Apple's mentality to this tool on the extension of the functionality it loves to offer and add a lot of seasoning, intended as a nice "pop" drift (intended just as popular), to be impressed by necessity to the Mac market, to bring it closer to the iPhone/iPad market, I see it very feasible.
On the comparison of prices with other brands, I believe that if Apple wants to create an instrument capable of putting into serious difficulties just many of those, for which it would become an impossible competitor to equalize, precisely because it is able to offer a complete set while the others the individual features
Just to give an example that goes beyond what you can imagine on the fly thinking of such a creative tool and therefore staying out of the figurative world: think of an integration of Logic's potential with those of having a multitouch and multi tool input (given by any other input devices); would open the field to a quantity of innovations and practically infinite experiments.
The potential and the appeal on the market are so high that, in my opinion Apple, with the need to put a strength point at the base of the new Apple Silicon, has built a pyrotechnic show on it for this autumn.
