> Third, the PC market is in the midst of its long decline. Is it really worth all of the effort and upheaval to move to a new architecture for a product that i

> Third, the PC market is in the midst of its long decline. Is it really worth all of the effort and upheaval to move to a new architecture for a product that is fading in importance? Intel may be expensive and may be slow, but it is surely good enough for a product that represents the past, not the future. This is one of the key things they got wrong. Mobile and tablet devices are not real computers. I can't run any software I want on them. They're locked down, managed, console type devices. There are other weaknesses at the OS and hardware level too, but the lack of flexibility and control is the most fundamental and hardest to change. If you opened up the OS to versatility and user control you could easily scale up an iPad with a bigger battery, more cores, and cooling, and you'd have a fantastic laptop. The UI would need some work too to make it suitable for more complex tasks, but that's an area where Apple excels when they want to. The locked down nerfed nature of mobile OSes is hard to change though because it exists for good reason. It addresses a primary need in their market niche. These devices are marketed to non-technical users, and in today's constant war zone environment a non-technical user without those controls will be inundated by malware and spyware. Still, this keeps them from being viable replacements for desktop/laptop systems in the professional market. For that reason desktop is not going away. We have two markets here that really do seem to demand two solutions. The desktop market decline wasn't the death of desktop. It was the loss of the low-end of the market, with non-technical and casual users migrating to phones and tablets. That transition is nearly complete, and the desktop/laptop market that remains is likely to remain until and unless something appears that truly does address that market niche. It's not a growing market but it is probably a stable one. Having a strong presence in that market is important for Apple because it's the market where developers live, and without developers who is going to make software and ecosystems for the rest of their devices? Who will ensure that these devices reach their full potential and thus are maximally appealing to consumers? No, doing everything in cloud is not that thing. I want to actually own my data, and broadband is still far too slow to make that workable for a wide range of tasks anyway.