Why does it matter?
It matters for a couple of reasons:
1) I like Apple products and personally, I would like to see it recognized by a tech world that has always considered them and "also ran" company.
But the real reason is:
2) The more successful they are, the better quality apps and compatibility you will get. These are the main reasons that make it difficult to use a mac in a modern day world. Mac started out with all kinds of crazy software that was way ahead of the competition, but as they became less viable as a user base, much of that went away. Now playing any modern games or using much of the business world software is a chore, and in many cases involves all kinds of weird exceptions and work arounds. Try using communicator on the mac, watching .wmv files, microsoft project or virtually any modern computer game, these are pretty poor experiences. Yes, somebody, here is going to post work arounds, but they are just that, work arounds instead of the driving standard. Trust me when I say there is a reason why Parallels and Fusion sell like crazy and it is not because the Mac does everything I need.
The only reason that Apple has gotten away with the stuff they have gotten away with regarding Flash and the iPhone is because their large user base gives them a bully pulpit to push for those technology changes. If the largest smartphone out there had had a "functioning" version of Flash and iPhone was only 12% of the market, Apple would have been laughed at. Since they are currently (arguably) the biggest player in the market web developers care. If they had not been the largest player, the transition away from Flash would have been a lot slower and I would have been forced to endure unworkable web sites on my smart phone and had a subpar experience.
Another example of this is .wmv, most people who send me video files send them in that format which will not play on my iPhone or iPad. I really want h.264 to become the standard, but for most people those files don't play on their computers unless they have quicktime installed and they use .wmv to guarantee compatibility. This is the same reason I don't use Keynote (which I vastly prefer to Power Point), at some point I will have to send those presentations to somebody else in the company and they are going to look like crap exported to Power Point.
The market leader makes the rules and I would rather be playing by Apple's rules than Google's. Please excuse the typos or poor logic been up all night drinking.
