iPad

The Macintosh Endgame

Jean-Louis Gassée:

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Instead of racing to the bottom as the market plummets, Apple appears to be taking the “high road”, in a sense: They’re taking refuge at the high end of the market by introducing new, more expensive MacBook Pros, with a visible differentiating feature, the Touch Bar. This is known, inelegantly, as milking a declining business, although you shouldn’t expect Apple to put it that way.

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But what would an Ax Mac mean in the real world, to software developers? The mind reels at the thought of yet another upheaval as developers rush to convert third-party Mac apps. Or will they? With hundreds of millions of iOS devices sold year after year, and ever more software engineering resources allocated to the platform, iOS-based hardware will win the day. The billion dollar question, here, is when? As Horace Dediu a.k.a. @asymco put it in a June 2014 tweet:

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In the end, iOS numbers make the decision. For its part, Apple will stay out of the way and let customers — and developers — decide when it’s time to buy the last Mac.

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As Apple’s MacBook Lineup Grows, Cheaper Options Die Off – WSJ

A lot of people are surprised by the cost of the new MBP’s and understandably so, but, here is one way to think about it –

[…] Previously, the average base price of a Mac laptop was $1,266. Now it is $1,613.

Does Apple just not care about the less wealthy? Perhaps. But another way to read the shift is Apple wants to push entry-level laptop users to the iPad Pro, which starts at $600. (With a keyboard case, it’s still just $750.) The iPad Pro has actually become my choice for taking on the road because it weighs less than a traditional laptop, and is sufficient for basic web browsing, social media and word processing.