MS and Google are committing big time to supporting developers with excellent support for all things linux in ChromeOS and Windows. This is an area where Apple used to be strong (through shipping a BSD OS with decent inherent compatibility) but has made life harder in recent years by basically neglecting that side of their product portfolio.
The lack of servicability of mac book pros and the many hardware issues with screens, keyboards, etc. paired with a less than stellar hw. performance means that it just no longer is what it used to be: a best in class hardware platform with a no nonsense OS that just works. The hardware is increasingly meh, and the OS feels stale and limiting. Actually, it's been a while since Apple launched a product that I really wanted rather than grudgingly upgraded to (like my current MBP).
IMHO Apple is increasingly fighting itself into a corner by insisting on exclusivity to their hardware platforms through walled garden style software platforms. Inevitably some developers and users are ending up on the wrong side of that wall. E.g. Metal vs. Vulkan, Chromium vs Safari, Swift/objectiveC vs. just about anything else. It's all so pointless. They do the same things, more or less, without doing something better in a clear way. They're basically just obstacles for users and developers, not key enablers.
MS just threw in the towel with Edge and is together with Google creating an ecosystem outside of Apple where a lot of interesting things are happening in the next few years. I'm no longer sure a mac is the best platform to experience that. IMHO this is the biggest challenge against Apple's dominance in two decades. MS is back and moving very aggressively.
Apple is locking themselves out of important markets through their choices in software platforms. E.g. the gaming market (aside from casual stuff for IOS) is a multi billion dollar market where Apple is an after thought. I have some games on my mac but most of the big titles don't ship for mac. The mac platform is just too different for them to bother and when things like opengl get deprecated, things don't get any easier.
This is a failure on Apple's part to accommodate developmers and anticipate where the market is going. On paper, Apple is an ideal platform for games: homogeneous hardware platform and a user base that is spending liberally in the Apple store. Why would you not want to target that as a game developer. Apple ought to be making billions from this and they just aren't. This "our way or the highway" attitude is locking them out. VR is a great example of something that is happening almost completely outside the Apple platform. Countless wealthy people spending way too much money on games, PC hardware and VR goggles and Apple gave us Metal, broken Nvidia drivers, and tumbleweeds when it comes to any kind of meaniningful VR/AR on Apple hardware.
Apple needs a new strategy. Marzipan is not it. It does not appeal to developers outside their bubble and that's where the action is these days. They need a new strategy that reverses the trend of developers working around them. More of the same is not going to make that happen.
Hint, except for the Switch, which has anyway NVN as their main API, no games console has had any big love for OpenGL or Vulkan, and it has never bothered AAA studios.
Apple follows what was standard practices across the 8 and 16 bit industry computer platforms, the PC was the outlier thanks to Compaq's clean room reverse engineering and IBM's failure to retake the PC back home with the PS architecture.
If anything, the current smartphone, tablet and 2-1 convertibles show that regular consumers prefer that model, not plugging PC Legos.
The desktop gaming market is minuscule compared to mobile. There was just an article on HN yesterday saying that most money in games are spent on mobile.
And that's in a market that is basically ignoring Apple users and their money. And you are forgetting that people need hardware to run those games as well. Apple sells expensive hardware but not to gamers .... who spend many billions on getting the best FPS. Apple is doing very little to tap into any of that. It would drive hardware sales and if they play their cards right also app store sales. Particularly VR is causing people to spend thousands of dollars on non Apple hardware.
You are right that mobile is currently bigger and Apple probably makes quite a bit out of IOS related sales of that market. But Desktop gaming is not nothing. Even for Apple.
The lack of servicability of mac book pros and the many hardware issues with screens, keyboards, etc. paired with a less than stellar hw. performance means that it just no longer is what it used to be: a best in class hardware platform with a no nonsense OS that just works. The hardware is increasingly meh, and the OS feels stale and limiting. Actually, it's been a while since Apple launched a product that I really wanted rather than grudgingly upgraded to (like my current MBP).
IMHO Apple is increasingly fighting itself into a corner by insisting on exclusivity to their hardware platforms through walled garden style software platforms. Inevitably some developers and users are ending up on the wrong side of that wall. E.g. Metal vs. Vulkan, Chromium vs Safari, Swift/objectiveC vs. just about anything else. It's all so pointless. They do the same things, more or less, without doing something better in a clear way. They're basically just obstacles for users and developers, not key enablers.
MS just threw in the towel with Edge and is together with Google creating an ecosystem outside of Apple where a lot of interesting things are happening in the next few years. I'm no longer sure a mac is the best platform to experience that. IMHO this is the biggest challenge against Apple's dominance in two decades. MS is back and moving very aggressively.
Apple is locking themselves out of important markets through their choices in software platforms. E.g. the gaming market (aside from casual stuff for IOS) is a multi billion dollar market where Apple is an after thought. I have some games on my mac but most of the big titles don't ship for mac. The mac platform is just too different for them to bother and when things like opengl get deprecated, things don't get any easier.
This is a failure on Apple's part to accommodate developmers and anticipate where the market is going. On paper, Apple is an ideal platform for games: homogeneous hardware platform and a user base that is spending liberally in the Apple store. Why would you not want to target that as a game developer. Apple ought to be making billions from this and they just aren't. This "our way or the highway" attitude is locking them out. VR is a great example of something that is happening almost completely outside the Apple platform. Countless wealthy people spending way too much money on games, PC hardware and VR goggles and Apple gave us Metal, broken Nvidia drivers, and tumbleweeds when it comes to any kind of meaniningful VR/AR on Apple hardware.
Apple needs a new strategy. Marzipan is not it. It does not appeal to developers outside their bubble and that's where the action is these days. They need a new strategy that reverses the trend of developers working around them. More of the same is not going to make that happen.