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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the creative market & education markets, and don't seem to be trying to address it. Why is the Mac Pro still the same price, three years after its release? Why not work with aeronautics, engineering, CAD, architecture vendors to port their apps to the Mac? Why not sacrifice hardware margins, now that they're moving into services?

I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?

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There is an unbelievable amount and diversity of software used in aerospace that is Windows only, from general mechanical engineering tools to highly specialized data acquisition and analysis packages, microcontroller interfaces, optics design, you name it. Getting all that to move over to a new platform would be an enormous undertaking for essentially no benefit on the part of the vendors. I suppose you could do it piecemeal if you really wanted to, but it's still an uphill battle in an industry where Windows is pretty solidly entrenched.

Gaming was super solidly entrenched on the Windows side. Valve put some muscle behind Wine and proton and that is no longer the case. I mean Apple even made Rosetta 2 for this silicon migration. If they really wanted it, it's totally within reach.

Gaming (on PC) is also full of people who care about Linux and escaping windows, so aside from Valve trying to get out from under Microsoft’s thumb, they have a dedicated user base to make their efforts worth it. The people and companies using engineering tools don’t really care about Linux.

It's because those markets are tiny compared to the bigger markets that they focus the company on, which is why they slowly drifted away from their focus on it. The HDR [0] youtuber creator machine they created with the new macbook pro alone probably dwarfs them by several orders of magnitude for example.

[0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a chicken & egg thing.

One thing to note is that you used to need a Power Mac for lots of tasks. Now it’s just a nice bonus over your MBP and harder to justify

True. I remember a video editing class in college and we had to use the cheese grater Mac Pro render our work. I don't remember all the details but I know I didn't want to try it at home on my white MacBook.

The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.

True, a lot of this moved to laptops for Innovator's Dilemma-reasons, but surely they have a plan to secure a more few niches, beyond FAANG software developers for the Mac, and students for the iPhone and Watch? The iPad was intended to dominate "what comes after PCs", but PCs never went away; and it just seems like Apple never course-corrected from that vision. That's what I'd like to see: a coherent vision for the future of computing. We haven't seen that since the failed post-PC thing in 2010.

> What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the creative market & education markets

Macbooks (Airs, at least) and iPads are still huge in education.

On that front, it's funny to me that Google was so successful with Chromebooks, when Jobs called thin clients the future for decades yet failed to ever make one.

Thin client commoditizes your platform and reduces the benefits of owning the entire hardware and software stack. Even if you needed an Apple device to connect to an Apple mainframe, the application running on the mainframe could probably be replicated (but better and cheaper) by Google.

> education market

Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't Apple's thing.

> Why not $thing?

Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless it boosts their services.

The only thing it makes sense for them to care about is their iPhone business. It's been that way for a long time. The iPhone business makes more money than wearables, services, Mac, and iPad combined.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...

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