> And if Apple “fails” with “trendsetting professionals” which is only a tiny market and the Mac itself is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, does it matter?
Only in that Apple would need a platform to develop for iOS. But at that future Mac failure point that dev platform would just be iPadOS or something. I would be disappointed if Macs went away, Windows is garbage and no Linux desktop experience is as good (for me) as the Mac's but Apple wouldn't really notice in terms of revenue.
However I don't think there's any foreseeable reason for the Mac to go away. Most of the Apple's development effort is shared between macOS and iOS with even more iOS things being ported to the Mac side. Even hardware development is shared between the platforms and will be shared with the Vision platform. Even with 10% of the company's revenues the Mac is nowhere near 10% of Apple's OpEx so it definitely makes more money than it costs to develop and maintain.
As an ex-Appler I'm a bit biased as well. I've used every version of Windows since 3.1 and Windows 8 was the last straw for me.
The Windows 8 UI was schizophrenic and a lot of effort was made to force you to use the newest most broken UI. I even got a touch capable laptop and could rarely use just Metro/Modern apps because they were crippled but the classic UI is just unusable with touch. I could only comfortably use Windows 8 with the third party Classic Shell and avoiding and Metro UI app.
Windows 10 walked some of those missteps back but then became incredibly infuriating with its automatic updates. I tend to leave machines running for weeks or months, sometimes asleep and other times not. Despite me telling Windows to not do updates automatically I'll come back to a machine sitting at the user login window. All my context now gone.
Or more fun Windows having updated in the background and I shut down or reboot without realizing. Depending on the updates I have to wait some unbounded length of time just to use the system again.
Windows sleep support is also still atrocious on most machines I've used. My MacBook I can put to sleep and remove the charger and leave it for a week and it'll have battery left to do work. My Windows work laptop I left asleep but unplugged and the battery was dead after a couple hours.
That's all on top of UI/UX issues I don't like because I've been using OSX for over twenty years. Mac keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are second nature to me now and using Windows is jarring. Ctrl as a modifier key is unergonomic vs the Command key. Windows' trackpad gestures, especially app switching, are uncomfortable. All of the UI fades and pop-up previews are too distracting and there's rarely a safe place to park your cursor to read something. Everything wants to face in some tooltip or context toolbar under the cursor.
I'm fine if people like Windows but for me it's just frustrating to use. Unfortunately my work laptop is Windows now and I'm constantly annoyed with its UX problems.
Only in that Apple would need a platform to develop for iOS. But at that future Mac failure point that dev platform would just be iPadOS or something. I would be disappointed if Macs went away, Windows is garbage and no Linux desktop experience is as good (for me) as the Mac's but Apple wouldn't really notice in terms of revenue.
However I don't think there's any foreseeable reason for the Mac to go away. Most of the Apple's development effort is shared between macOS and iOS with even more iOS things being ported to the Mac side. Even hardware development is shared between the platforms and will be shared with the Vision platform. Even with 10% of the company's revenues the Mac is nowhere near 10% of Apple's OpEx so it definitely makes more money than it costs to develop and maintain.