
The Macintosh Endgame - MaysonL
https://mondaynote.com/the-macintosh-endgame-7d6be7dc33ab
======
Alex3917
Much of the shrinking market is due to the fact that laptops used to need to
be replaced every three or four years, and now only need to be replaced every
six years or so. That's about how long it takes for the hardware to wear out,
and for the next generation of hardware to be significantly better.

In 2022 Intel plans to have 7nm CPUs available. Those laptops will be
considerably more powerful, and laptop's purchased today will be starting to
fall apart. So it's unlikely that folks are going to go ten years between new
laptops any time soon, meaning the size of the market should level off
somewhat.

There is plenty of room for Apple to continue to make improvements within this
general form factor, and to reduce the price. And if tablets or phones really
do somehow make laptops obsolete, then Apple will just license or open source
OS X. That way it wouldn't have to deal with making laptops, but developers
would still have a good platform for making iOS apps.

The idea that OS X or MBPs are going anyway makes no sense, at least for the
next decade or so.

~~~
partiallypro
I agree with the first portion of your post, but I'm not entirely convinced on
the second. I do think it is entirely within the realm of possibility that
Apple will kill off their desktop and laptop lines. I think it's a ways off,
but Apple's refusal to evolve in any meaningful way in the space might make
their efforts a legacy line at best.

~~~
mrep
> I do think it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Apple will
> kill off their desktop and laptop lines.

How would anyone develop apps for their IOS devices than?

~~~
nestlequ1k
Probably using Visual Studio on a Windows machine.

------
api
He's ignoring a rather large elephant in the room: iOS is the most locked down
OS in history.

That's going to keep two kinds of people from ever moving to it as their
primary computing device: people who care about freedom, and power users who
care about versatility and complex work flows. The latter includes most
developers. You just can't do that stuff on iOS. You can barely even run your
own apps on it.

I suppose you could push a model where all the interesting stuff lives in the
cloud or headless metal servers and the iOS device is a portable terminal with
apps and the Web as sophisticated terminal emulations more or less. Think of
an app or a big JS site as a giant analog of a VT macro.

I see PC sales declining and then leveling off after having lost most casual
and low end users to tablets and mobile.

~~~
heisenbit
Productive work - unlike consumption - is based on the file metaphor. Not well
supported on iOS. The workplace runs on written conversations and that means
keyboards are required.

The high road leads to no good place. Apple has been there in the past. SGI
and many other bodies are laying rotting left and right.

Prices for PC are declining and in any case there is already a significant and
probably unsustainable gap. Macs have 4 cost drivers that Apple can tackle to
ensure they keep growing their market share:

\- Manufacturing

\- Intel

\- Apple margins

\- Mac features

Compromising manufacturing would damage the brand. Intel is somewhat kept in
check by the threat of Ax (and fighting back by providing more function/lock-
in around the CPU) but ultimately an Ax processor may be attractive. Apple
margins are something to consider both from appropriateness for the market and
as a stop-gap measure. Providing a low feature Mac may be another and imho the
most promising one. A 12-13'' laptop aimed at the basic educational need and
simple business use case market priced around $1000. Not much CPU/GPU but
enough battery to last a day.

~~~
api
This is a great point. Keep am eye on the "Raspberry Pi clamshell case" type
laptops. These are truly disruptive. A much higher end version of this could
be interesting. I'd consider an Octacore A64 with 8-16GB RAM and 4K or better
display.

------
rackforms
My brother, a comparatively well paid teacher in the Midwest desperately wants
but cannot afford a new MacBook Pro. At the same time his school and many
others are awash in perfectly functional Chromebooks.

In my own experience then we've got Apple purposely cutting off vast swaths of
potential buyers due to lackluster/irregular updates and high prices on one
end, and seemingly unaware of a vast market for education and lower price
users on the other.

A declining market is one thing but this, so far as it looks to me, is Apple
simply throwing potential customers away. That's not riding a wave, it's just
plain bad business. What am I missing here?

~~~
cyberferret
Does the Apple educational pricing discounts still not make it worthwhile? I
have no idea what the discount percentage is now, but I remember years ago
some teacher (and tertiary student) friends of mine being delighted in being
able to afford and Apple Macbook due to this incentive.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
Last time I checked the educational discount was around $100 for a $2K+
laptop. Here is the relevant link [http://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/buy-
mac/macbook-pro/13-inch](http://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/buy-mac/macbook-
pro/13-inch) if someone is interested.

~~~
cyberferret
Hmm, I thought I could remember my friends saying the educational discount was
around 20%. Perhaps I am not remembering correctly, or the discount has
changed a lot lately.

~~~
grzm
I remember larger discounts as well. That said, summer vacation seemed longer,
too.

------
IBM
>Microsoft contends that the Surface hybrid, now in its fourth iteration, is
the best-of-both-worlds that their customers want.

Microsoft contends this because the market forced their hand. They have no
presence in smartphones or tablets so having a separate operating system for
them is untenable. They tried very hard to get developers on board and it
didn't work.

~~~
bhauer
Surface didn't work? Its current generation is making a profit and is well-
reviewed by users and tech journalists alike.

For what it's worth, Surface products are exactly what I want in a portable
computer. I find both traditional tablets (such as Android tablets and iPads)
and legacy-style laptops (including the new Macbook Pro) unexciting and
ultimately not worth my money.

~~~
prodigal_erik
They had to go back to hardware that runs Win10 x64 apps, because nobody
wanted to ship WinRT ARM apps.

~~~
bhauer
Oh is _that_ what we're talking about? Yeah, WinRT was needlessly limited.

But it's also a distant memory. Speaking about it today is about as relevant
as discussing iOS 6 or Android 4.1.

~~~
fencepost
Possibly. Still, when you think about the death of Windows RT, remember that
there's still a version of Windows running on ARM, and the ecosystem of
applications that run on it is now called "Windows Universal apps."

Windows Phone may be moribund in the market but that ARM capacity and the
admittedly not ready for prime time Continuum (phone + monitor /keyboard
/mouse) desktop could lead to a better supported and accepted descendant
returning to the market currently dominated by Chromebooks.

------
mark_l_watson
Good article, and as the ex-CEO of Apple, he thinks more deeply about Apple's
business than most of us.

Even though I have several Linux laptops and a Chromebook, the device I use
the most is my 12" iPad Pro. It is great for light weight writing, SSHing into
a server to trouble shoot a problem, run updates, etc. I just bought a new
MacBook, which I am starting to like a lot, after a period of getting used to
the keyboard, but I just use it for work. If my wife sees me using the MacBook
then she assumes I am working (programming). With the iPad, I could be having
fun or working. I look at the iPad as the future for most people.

That said, what I really want is convergence. I want one seemless environment
that seems the same no matter what device I am on. I actually more or less
have that, in a kluge way, but I want something more polished and effortless.
I think Apple, and perhaps Microsoft have a good shot at doing this near term.
With some trade offs, you can get this now with a Chromebook, Android phone,
Chromecast, and Google Home but as much as I like Google's garden I don't want
to live in it all the time.

~~~
abrowne
He was an Apple exec, but never CEO.

~~~
iainmerrick
He was also a founder of Be, which may contribute to people misremembering.
There was talk of Apple buying Be back in the day, but they ended up buying
NeXT instead. In some parallel universe, Gassée ended up playing the role of
Steve Jobs.

------
nikolay
I just bought an HP, which was half the price of the new MacBook Pro, has
better specs, and looks as good if not better. And instead of having a fancy
touch-friendly strip, my entire screen is touch-enabled. I've invested tons of
money into little, but expensive apps that allow me to maximize windows
instead of making them full-screen (Moom), or make a large number of icons fit
in the menubar (Bartender), but this is getting ridiculous! I think Windows 10
Pro is a better OS and is more developer-friendly than MacBook nowadays, too.

------
anindha
"In a fantasy world, Apple produces an Ax-based Mac"

Combining the iPad and Macbook is equivalent to rolling the iPod into the
iPhone.

I also have a Macbook and its the perfect computer for normal laptop tasks. I
am surprised by how many people don't know this exists.

"But what would an Ax Mac mean in the real world, to software developers?"

There are lots of companies producing iOS and Mac apps. It is going to be
easier than porting programs from Windows to Mac.

~~~
simonh
> Combining the iPad and Macbook is equivalent to rolling the iPod into the
> iPhone.

It really isn't, Apple is right that the interaction models are too different.

The argument Microsoft make that you can have your cake and eat it, have a
device that's an ideal tablet and an ideal laptop, has failed. The compromises
are too great. Desktop software has interaction targets that are too small for
a touch interface and the mouse interaction model doesn't map across to touch.
But supporting both touch apps and desktop apps on the same device is a non
starter. You can't require all your app developers to implement two different
UIs every time.

The iPad Pro optional keyboard doesn't prove anything in this regard. It's
just a dedicated text input device, not an alernate primary interaction mode.

Note that MS and Apple approach this from opposite directions. The MS solution
is primarily a keyboard interface with touch as an ancillary mode. The iPad
Pro is primarily a touch device with an ancillary keyboard mode.

But desktop software on the Surface is next to unusable in tablet mode.
Meanwhile iPad software is perfectly usable with the keyboard attached. But it
achieves this by decidedly not taking full advantage of the horizontal
interface. There is no trackpad on the iPad Pro keyboard and no mouse support.
For iPad software, they serve no purpose. That's why even with keyboard
attached the iPad is decidedly not a converged device. The keyboard is not a
primary interface, it's really just a text input peripheral with some
convenience UI interaction options. There will never be iPad software that
requires the physical keyboard.

~~~
mrep
Ipads will also need to add extra monitor support as a buying a macbrook pro
and some monitors is worth the extra cost versus developing on the small
screen real estate of an ipad.

In addition, IOS app development is only supported on mac which will not be
trivial to port to IOS. As @simonh said, touch and mouse UX are quite
different and I don't see them being combined optimally in any near future.

~~~
mrep
Idea extension:

VR to enable users to maximize visual field for productivity, Magic leap type
interaction which could bridge the gap between touch and mouse
(pointing/"touching" at objects in a users visual field would require less
effort than actually trying to tap the screens of multiple monitors) might be
that synergy that will be able to bridge those gaps * .

* keyboards are still probably going to be used for a long time though.

------
honkhonkpants
JLG seems deliberately stuck in the past. Just for starters they retired the
Macintosh brand 18 years ago.

~~~
lambdasquirrel
Or it might be intentional tongue-in-cheek nostalgia or something along those
lines.

The guy was once head of Macintosh division back when PCs mattered a lot more.
Give him some cred. :P

~~~
honkhonkpants
Perhaps but I'm not sure it's healthy to be nostalgic for the Macintosh line
of 20 years ago. It was a train wreck, really.

