I'm not sure why everyone thinks Apple was caught off guard by this, it was a decade/generation in the making. Apple dumped dollars into iOS/iPadOS because tha

I'm not sure why everyone thinks Apple was caught off guard by this, it was a decade/generation in the making. Apple dumped dollars into iOS/iPadOS because that's what had inertia and they wanted to keep it rolling. At the same time they required you to own or have access to a MacBook if you wanted to write Apps for those platforms, ensuring there would at least be some demand for the platform. They also transitioned from a proprietary and dated Power CPU to the commodity Intel x64 CPUs reducing their development costs. MacBooks got adopted at places like MIT as cheap powerful Unix machines and as the LAMP stack took over the internet they became the preferred developer's box. These were the seeds planted. Now days they're a lifestyle/prestige item for college kids, soccer moms, and corporate executives. They're focusing on it because the platform is approaching critical mass.