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Here's my speculation: After the stellar early growth years for the iPad (here are some graphs from 2015 https://qz.com/376041/the-ipads-first-five-years-in-fiv

Here's my speculation: After the stellar early growth years for the iPad (here are some graphs from 2015 https://qz.com/376041/the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-charts/ https://qz.com/376041/the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-cha...), there was an impression at the Apple that the future of the Mac is iOS. Then that growth leveled off, and now iPad looks more like a comparable category to Macs (see the more recent Six Colors graphs https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quarter-in-charts/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quar...). So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro. Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc... The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).

dangus 6y ago
While I don't think your analysis is wrong, I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners. iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter. If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years. That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.
- dimator 6y ago
  I don't think the iOS-ification is overblown at all. The fact that unsigned apps are met with increased hostility, and increased hoops to jump through to run them, demonstrates this. It's not hard to imagine in the next couple of macos releases that homebrew stops working, or requires grotesque hacks like local building/linking to escape the signing requirements. Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dangus 6y ago
    Signed apps is not iOS-ification. That's just normal, sane security practices. Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team: "Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!" https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/ https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners. A very important percentage. E.g. Final Cut used to have a 60% market share. Now it's may be 25%? There's most likely a dip among every other category of professional users.
  - dangus 6y ago
    Final Cut is a very old product (1998). The entire market for digital editing has expanded greatly since then. We don't know because Apple doesn't report it, but I would surmise that Final Cut has had a consistently growing user base.

dangus 6y ago

While I don't think your analysis is wrong, I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners. iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter. If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years. That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.

dimator 6y ago
I don't think the iOS-ification is overblown at all. The fact that unsigned apps are met with increased hostility, and increased hoops to jump through to run them, demonstrates this. It's not hard to imagine in the next couple of macos releases that homebrew stops working, or requires grotesque hacks like local building/linking to escape the signing requirements. Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dangus 6y ago
  Signed apps is not iOS-ification. That's just normal, sane security practices. Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team: "Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!" https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/ https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/
dmitriid 6y ago
> I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners. A very important percentage. E.g. Final Cut used to have a 60% market share. Now it's may be 25%? There's most likely a dip among every other category of professional users.
- dangus 6y ago
  Final Cut is a very old product (1998). The entire market for digital editing has expanded greatly since then. We don't know because Apple doesn't report it, but I would surmise that Final Cut has had a consistently growing user base.