> I'm sure Apple would love to lock down Macbooks the same way they did for iDevices, but if they do that, they would end up killing the Macbook market overnight.
Maybe, but its better to think holistically.
iPad hardware sales still trail Macs. An argument could be made that iPad hardware sales + iPad-sourced App Store sales does exceed Mac hardware sales + Mac-sourced App Store sales, but it legitimately is not by much. 2022Q2 iPad hardware sales were ~$7B; Mac sales were ~$10B; total Apple Services revenue, including App Store, on iPhone+iPad+Mac, Music, TV+, etc, was ~$19B.
That context emphasizes your statement: Apple would (maybe) love a reality where the Mac were as locked down as iOS, but achieving that reality would torpedo their Mac sales. But, we need to go a step further: it would torpedo their Mac sales as it has their iPad sales.
To me, the most frustrating thing about being a long-time Apple user (and at times, a fan) is watching their spirit of "disrupting themselves" disappear. They systemically can't do it anymore.
A few days ago I was playing around with python on a windows machine; I say "python3 thing.py" in a terminal; it says its not installed; and immediately opens the Windows App Store to install it. I gotta say; that workflow was the most impressed I've been with a computer in four years (and it was immediately paid back by trying to search for "Spotify" in the windows start search and it returning a website as the first result, but I digress). That's self-disruption; the idea that doing the unobvious thing from one revenue-line perspective can lead to % upticks in other revenue lines that net higher total revenue. The Windows Store sucks for buying apps; but doubling it as a dev-focused package manager? And WSL is a cost-center for Microsoft, but jeeze... does a Surface Laptop make sense for me? Maybe.
Apple constantly says "we want it all, its our way or no way" then cracks start appearing in that peerless veneer and out those cracks surge billions in revenue. Other companies (sometimes) say "ok, we're not great at that, how can we work around that weakness to still drive revenue in what we're great at." Microsoft sucks at building a phone; so bring the services to the phone people already have. They suck at building an App Store; but how can we still make that App Store useful, if not profitable? Their consoles have always been in last place; so how can we deliver the main revenue driver, the games, to more people (cloud streaming)? The list goes on.
I'm not asserting that Microsoft is a better company, whatever that means, I'm just asserting that Apple needs to learn something from them, because at this point the two have switched places. Apple today is acting like Microsoft twenty years ago, and vice-versa, and someone at Apple has to be recognizing that iPhone rev growth is slowing, iPad rev is flat, M1 gave the Mac a little boost but it's been slow for 15 years, their most successful new product of the past, like, decade, were headphones. Momentum is great when its with you, but its apt to decay, and once it starts going the other way its a bitch to turn around.