Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Apple still killed it.
Apple is the best (large org) at marshaling resources, focus, priorities, pushing the envelope. It's been fantastic.
But every decision has consequences. They abandon beloved products. They deprioritorize code quality.
I wish they'd find a better balance, or clever new org strategies. Spinoff abandoned products. A separate cleanup crew to address technical debt, fix bugs. (I'm sure there's plenty of other devs, like me, who revel in house cleaning.)
There are a lot of costs associated with backwards compatibility with very little payoff if it doesn't mean a lot to the bottom line.
Companies of all sizes (even FAAMNG) will act to protect that kind of existing revenue.
And my point was that you can do all of the things you listed for less than $500M; probably for less than $250M. Developers are more expensive than they used to be but $100M+ still goes a pretty long way.
Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well.
Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.
Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. They killed Aperture, which lots of photographers loved. They replaced Final Cut Pro 7 with a much more limited Final Cut X, and seeded lots of ground to Adobe in the process.
There's also OS X Server, although there's a strong argument to be made it wouldn't have survived in the modern world anyway, and Apple just saw the writing on the wall.
Logic does seem to have done consistently fine, at least, so that's something.
Sure, and this might be skewed by hindsight because they did make new releases for a handful of years, but it was an acquahire to develop Aperture and other color tools for Final Cut Pro. Small shops use After Effects on Windows, medium shops used Shake on Windows, and large shops used Shake in Linux. Because of hardware costs you'll be very hard-pressed to get medium or large shops to use macOS.
I also don't see Apple investing/competing with the big transitions that happened in CG over the next 5 years; 64bit, 4k/8k, and stereo. Apple had special deals where they offered Shake's source code when it was discontinued and a few studios clung on and tried valiantly to accommodate [1]
[1] https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-...
For iOS Developers, I am not so sure. If Apple came out with Xcode for Windows at WWDC, I'm pretty sure a lot of iOS developers would be overjoyed. Now, a build farm is much easier among other advantages.
I would also imagine they would remove anything having to do with the Macintosh except perhaps the Catalyst compiles which should decrease some of the neglect problems causing bugs.
How many, though, and would they really switch to Windows or Linux, or retire from the industry?
Apple has always — or at least since 1984 — had an incredibly loyal fanbase. I think that the sort of slights which would make me leave a platform just roll of their collective back.
Windows is also making a very compelling argument with WSL2
As far as I can see the Mac market share hasn't shifted in the last few years. I wouldn't take too much notice of a handful of people whinging on HN.
You can’t extrapolate from that. No less when it’s not even correct for general trends most of the time.
Apple sells roughly 18-20M Mac per year. According to their own words more than 50% of these are completely new to the Mac platform. ( And most of them are form China ) You would have expected 9-10M new Active Users every year if no one was leaving the platform. Instead from 2014 to 2018, during that 5 years they managed to add 20M. ( Genuine Question, Did anyone notice there are less Mac users in US? ) There are also 20M registered developers, which adds to the bottom-line of Mac. What used to be annual Active User number reporting stopped in 2019. And even stopped mentioning satisfactory rate of Mac. Mac Pro was done not because they cared, but because a few closely connected real professional customers threaten to leave the platform before they took action. ( And many left before they notice )
It is like in a marriage when your partner keeps telling others in public how he/she loves you. But did not show any care or action during that time. For years He/She dont even talk to you or notice you. You try talking to him/her about having problems but he/she completely ignore you. One day you publicly file for divorce and He/She rushed out and tell others how much he/she cares and are working on it. That is not caring, it is called saving faces.
I don't know, look how long it took for Apple to finally replace the damn keyboards.
No. Look at MS and the difference in quality. They are both samey in the $$$ department, but MS much larger focus and enormous dev base makes it not such a nice thing for products. Apple reduced scope is what lets them have quality thing. They do not have much manpower (I mean, they are one of the few trillion dollar company, their human resources don't look like that), spreading focus would harm quality. Their iDevices makes 5x as much money, that's where their eyes are, that focus can't be made smaller for an "infirior product" money-wise.
Apple jettisoned all of that diversity to refine a few precious use cases to earn that "quality" aura.
I think this move to ARM is signaling a couple more use cases being tossed to the curb, like beefy workstations and PC gaming.
- Microsoft is a non starter in mobile
- trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful
- Windows is horrible as a touch first interface.
- even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows.
-it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows.
- They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to use a competitors engine.
MS is not exactly the shining example of how to successfully pivot as technology changes.
On the other hand, they entered the game-console game very late but still had a pretty good run. They entered the cloud game similarly late but they're now killing it. They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.
So it's not like they cannot execute, or like they are fundamentally impeded by their fundamental structure. They can smash it with the best of them, when the lead is focused.
> They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.
Rephrased: Microsoft won Browser War I by using illegal tactics, and lost Browser War II because authorities made them stop using illegal tactics. IE/Edge was always a bad product, and its success was due to external factors.
That said, Microsoft has lots of resources and I don't doubt they could have made a good browser. By extension, I don't see Chromium Edge as a loss for Microsoft so much as an informed decision to throw in the towel. How does Microsoft benefit from spending millions of dollars on a custom rendering engine, when Google gives Chromium away for free? Microsoft can fully rebrand it, and put in their own ads, tracking, and default search engines. From my vantage point, Microsoft just saved an enormous amount of money and lost very little.
They also lost billions of dollars on the console market. Is it even as profitable as the AirPods now?
As far as getting in mobile too early. Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple getting back into mobile. You do remember that Apple was almost bankrupt in the 90s?
Apple was able to port OS X to the iPhone partially because it didn’t have all of the bloat of Windows.
I developed on WinCE devices using both .Net CF and C++/MFC. I am very much aware of the limitations.
Between that and the EU ruling that forced them to implement the somewhat-silly browser-choice system, it was a "hostile environment" where the political message was fairly clear. Combined with a situation where IE was effectively dominant, it sapped any appetite to take it forward or take risks with it.
> Is [the console market] even as profitable as the AirPods now?
That is not the point, the point is that they pivoted just fine when they wanted to. They even had something genuinely novel with the gesture-tracking system. And how could they not? Windows and Office are a license to print money, even today.
> Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple
That was 1 device. Microsoft and their partners tried tons of different iterations of formats, some that didn't even exist at the time (kindles, book-like, palm-like - I had an HP that, without a stylus, looks now like a thick iPhone, but was produced in 2003)... but screen tech and cellular bandwidth simply were not good enough at the time.
I'm not talking of exhaustion because of financial losses (Microsoft was printing money, they could have done the same 10 times over), but of a shared weariness for the effort. At one point they basically gave up. I believe the famous Ballmer snark on the iPhone announcement was sincere, in the typically-disdainous way of his: Ballmer thought he had seen it all and this was just one more, nothing to write home about. They had failed so many times in the space that they had lost faith in the possibility of success.
There was no browser choice in the US and I believe it lost its lead here first.
If that was true they wouldn't have released the Mac Pro.