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Comment by allenu | Hacker News Reader

I think it's clear that Apple has recognized that their target markets don't care to have useful computers. Just look way back to when Steve Jobs was still alive and he was talking about how "PCs are going to be like trucks. Fewer people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy."

They could certainly add features to make them more like general purpose computers, but there's a bit of product development and engineering "tax" they'd have to pay over time to maintain that aspect. Much easier from a product development standpoint to create products that provide a walled-garden experience, especially if that's what most customers want.

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The truck metaphor is actually incredibly apt, because if you want to do "truck stuff" with your PC, a lot of people think you can't do that on a phone, but 90% of what people need a beefy computer for could be done on a phone if we had that kind of culture around it.

Macbook pros for a lot of us are effectively like daily driving a lifted Ford Raptor with a snorkel. Most of what I do on my personal device I easily could do on a Chromebook or tablet, and pretty much all of the rest is entirely possible on a Chromebook with the Linux subsystem setup (which is what I did pre-Macbook). It's like if I'd setup an expensive truck for off-roading, but in the end it turned out to be aspirational and I only take it somewhere that can't handle a Subaru Outback once or twice a year.

Hah this is very true, though I'd argue the real Raptor with a snorkel is the gaming PC. I'm typing this on one right now and I mostly play Factorio which could run on any old potato, so yeah I'm that guy. The MBP is probably more akin to the BMW when you could be driving a Honda.

All that said, I'll take this hobby over the truck hobby. $3k for a pretty good machine is great vs. $80k for the snorkel truck.

Steve Jobs didn't foresee that Americans would basically only buy trucks (and SUVs) in 20 years. You can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore.

Maybe small phones are like sedans, and the bigger and bigger iPhones are the trucks? Take this analogy where you will.

Uh what? Where in the US are you?

I will admit that "you can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore" was a bit of hyperbole, but certainly they have declined precipitously, from 80% of the US new vehicle market 40 years ago to about 25% today [0]. You can still buy sedans in the US, but not from american car companies [1].

[0] https://mercercapital.com/insights/blogs/auto-dealer-valuati...

[1] https://carbuzz.com/eulogy-for-the-chevrolet-malibu-and-seda...

Trucks analogy is interesting. I (temporarily) live in the US South and trucks are 3:1 to all other vehicles here.

So true. Whether people need them or not, people will spend the money to buy them.

If that's the case, then why do we go to work on a computer instead of a phone? Oh, wait. A screen. A mouse, a keyboard. Really, if they wanted to, you could simply dock your phone and have that experience if the company was willing to put in the time.

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