The iPhone and iPad have been very popular compared to the Mac.
Apple sees this and wants to make the Mac as much of a post-PC device as a PC can be.
The thing Apple forgets, though (or maybe they don't), is that the entire world has been trained to use a more complex computing environment and is capable of doing so. Sure, there are use cases where a senior citizen would be better off with an appliance-like interface, but is it right for everyone?
At times I've seen Apple's desire to make things simpler make things more complicated if you want to do something Apple doesn't anticipate. Or, you need an app to complete a very specific function.
Apple is a bit like a poet who is able to non-sentimentally erase lines that don't serve the singular purpose of a poem, even if they were really clever lines.
I think there is a case to be made for PC era devices with features that Apple's OS will lose over time. And I hope Microsoft is there to make that case. But I am starting to get where Apple is going. I don't know if I like itit's a very sterile, unemotional, inorganic, intuitive-only-through-appliance-like-nature paradigm. It's not intuitive like pre-Mac OS X or Mac OS X had been. Instead it's bold and obvious like primary colors. It's less intuitive and more simple.
Apple has often stripped itself of aging technology before consumers were ready, but then they did it with serial ports, floppy drives, and DVD drives, not software features.
If you want to feel really paralyzed try using a ChromeBook. It's unnerving to use one. You can't do anything with it but what it was designed to do. You want to close the browser window to see the desktop, but you can't. It's just there, waiting for you to pick a web application. It's like an appliance. People don't sit with their washing machines, playing with the knobs, customizing them just so. It's the same with the direction Apple is going. And if you want to feel what too fast in that direction feels like, the ChromeBook is the perfect example.
Apple's vision is to create devices that people use for their intended functions. Apple doesn't seem to any longer want to create devices that people love. It's about making the same PCs of the 90s and 00s not more advanced, but more like appliances. You could take the complex, interesting, quirky, emotionally connected OSes from the 90s and 00s and make them more advanced, but Apple's not doing that. It's making the PC for everyone (not just the rest of us), all over again, starting from scratch as if it's the late 1970s, as if no one had ever learned how to use their computers over the last few decades. As if the last few decades didn't happen. They are abandoning the computer of the last 20 years to build one from scratch. And it's boring, and it's like a washing machine. But it works, and people like it. One app, one button, one tap. Nothing more.
If you're looking for meaning in an Apple device, an emotional connection to the software, a camaraderie with the underdog, I think those days are over.