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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business, and the share made up by hackers far smaller still. They're perfectly happy to let those devs for whom up-to-date tools and FOSS are important go elsewhere; look at any college classroom and you'll see they have way more new customers to replace them.

This isn't to say they'll actively discourage hackers from using their products, but if it comes down to a product being hack-friendly or adhering to Apple's core principles, hack-friendliness doesn't stand a chance.

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Actually, Apple's PC business has never been better. They sold 5,198,000 Macs last quarter, a record. Mac sales are up 26% compared to the same quarter last year. Of course they sold 37 million iPhones, but the amount of revenue the Mac generates isn’t small by any means.

I don’t have a problem with them not shipping software that’s incompatible with how they do business; I suspect hackers and other clueful users will continue using the available tools like Homebrew to install whatever they want.

If Apple is driven by profit, then the main purpose of Mac, iPod, and even iPad these days is to sell more iPhones (brand halo and integration). Isn't that crazy?

Macs were only 14% of revenue last quarter ($6.6B/46.3B). By contrast, iPhones were 52% ($14.4B). And Macs have ~28% gross margin, while iPhones have ~60%, so they add even less than 14% to the profit picture.

While any other PC manufacturer would die to have Apple's Mac business, it's mouse-nuts to Apple.

Its also a stable base. The iPad might or the iPhone might die off to some competitive product, Andoid or whatever, but, as long as PC = Windows, there will be a large market for Macs (no, most people wont consider Linux)

once macs have died, and i was there an 18year old mac c++ programmer. believe me many things like that can happen again in tech world.

My statement, which was apparently unclear, is that PCs represent a declining share of Apple's business, and that hackers represent a declining share of that. That's not to say both aren't growing, but that neither is the keystone of Apple's future growth and success.

"the share made up by hackers far smaller still."

Apple laptops like the MacBook Air are pretty popular amongst your average hacker crowd. You still get a reasonable Terminal Application and most of what you are (basically) looking for from a Unix text environment.

Grandparent said hackers make up a small fraction of Apple's customers, not that Apple is unpopular among hackers.

Well, that's true only insofar that _all_ non IOS customers are making up a smaller fraction of Apple's customers. Within the PC/Laptop Crowd, I think the technical enthusiast/Hacker group is pretty important to that product line. They certainly put a lot more effort into their Terminal Application than Microsoft does. Does Microsoft even offer a Terminal Application? I typically download SecureCRT/Putty. Also - Does microsoft come with SSH?

I guess the point I'm trying to make is "Hackers are important to Apple, insofar that that Macintosh PC/Laptop line is important to Apple."

Have you seen this blog before: http://blog.commandlinekungfu.com/ ALl the things you never knew you could do with Bash (at least a modern Linux one) and Powershell (and occasionally cmd.exe)

Also -- MS now support a full headless installation (no Explorer etc) on Server 2008: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.02.geekofal...

PowerShell (Windows' shell as of 7) is actually really nice, but it doesn't make any attempt at all to ease the transition to and from *nix shells.

The shell itself is ok, but it still has a rubbish interface / terminal emulator. It's a Corvette engine wrapped in a rusted out Yugo chassis.

It has aliases for a few built in unix commands... but could be more harmful than helpful. Like Javascript, C++ and Java all have 'similar' syntaxes.

Its important to note that one of the main things that differentiates between platforms is the quality and quantity of the available content. If you want to build a platform the first things to do is build great development tools for that platform at making it a platform that is attractive to developers and power users. This strategy has been critical in resurgence of Apple and I doubt that they would want to become a less attractive development platform.

"Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business..."

Flat out BS. Take a second and look up the numbers.

Actually - that part is quite true - but it's only because the iPhone (and iPad) is such a rapidly _increasing_ part of their business.

Thank you. I didn't expect that to be such a controversial statement. Allow me to clarify: the share of apple's revenue generated by its pc business is rapidly falling. It has been supplanted by ios devices.

Actually, it is true. In particular, profit-wise the Mac business is tiny, less than 10% of profits. They could shut down Mac and you would barely notice in their next earnings statement.

I wish it weren't so, because I love my Mac. But Apple's future is iOS, not Mac OS. Maybe someday they'll merge and it'll all be one thing?

Actually it would hurt their iOS market greatly. iOS devices are worthless without their third party apps. And these apps can only be produced on a Mac. In fact, I bought my Mac so that I could build iOS apps. If not for 3rd party apps, it would simply boil down to the device, the software that Apple ships with and the browser. Android devices will clearly win hands down in such a scenario. Initially it would be the case of worse is better but over time it would overtake iOS devices in terms of features and sales.

iOS apps can only be produced on a Mac because that's how Apple wants it. In the unlikely event that Apple did decide to ditch the Mac, they'd port their iOS developer tools to another platform.

I think Apple's Mac roadmap is:

* Mac continues to evolve slowly, not have major innovations. Innovations that do occur will be on things that are aligned with iOS-like devices (like Launchpad, Mac App Store, Macbook Air's).

* Someday they will ditch Mac, when an iOS device can be used to (1) create new iOS apps, and (2) be a productivity machine (e.g. w/ keyboard / etc).

Those of us who like to poke under the hood will have to move back to Linux or something else.

I love my Mac because it's NOT iOS. I just can't see how all-software-from-the-app-store would be able to support the beautiful mess of tools I use every single day.

I agree. The day that happens is the day I (sadly) go back to Linux for my dev environment.

The Mac sales are not diminishing at all. They are INCREASING. The fact the iOS is also increasing, and increasing at a much higher rate, doesn't mean Mac sales are decreasing.

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