Which is the exact mistake Apple made in the late 80s and early 90s, which decimated their market share and almost destroyed the Mac business
...well there was also the slight problem that the late 80s to mid 90s were the height of the Wintel monopoly & anticompetitive practices. People don't seem to appreciate how much more diversity there is in IT now. Wintel obliterated the market share of
everything else and Apple were pretty much the
only non-Wintel personal computer maker to survive the 1990s. Finding a niche and occupying it is the way to survive such conditions.
Also, sad truth is, Today's Apple could release XCode for Linux for iOS devs and drop the entire Mac range tomorrow and still be a hugely successful company. Steve Jobs' return did great things for the Mac range, but how he
really made today's Apple was by releasing a music player and following that up, just at the right time, with a phone.
Still, Apple are around the #4 largest personal computer supplier, probably higher up if you limit that to consumer/retail sales, which is a pretty big "niche". That's probably on the back of (mainly) laptops. Their problem is in their former strong ground - audio/video creative "pros" - and I'm afraid that niche has been shrinking for years because Wintel PCs and Workstations are now much more capable than they were in the 80s and Apple can't hope to match the range of cheap but powerful PC hardware on offer - and all they could do during the Intel years was, basically, put their standard Xeon hardware in prettier boxes and rely on people being locked-in to MacOS workflows. They won't grow their "pro" market by doing more of the same.
Apple Silicon is an opportunity to offer something different but, really, its big success is likely to be in the ultraportable laptop market where the performance/power ratio is such a huge advantage. It is not a good match to making a full-size PCIe workstation like the Mac Pro - although it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
The Mac Studio could be a good way to open up new markets, as an "appliance" for running well-optimised Pro apps like FCPx and Logic. It's cute, powerful and not
that expensive c.f. a much bulkier AV workstation PC (esp. with current PC GPU prices) - and could sell to freelancers, "pro" Youtubers etc. who can make their own buying decisions (without having to deal with beancounters who don't care how much time you waste if it saves money from the equipment budget). It's kinda a re-tread of the Trashcan, except this time round Apple should be able to "do it properly" instead of kludging it together from available Intel and AMD parts
and the Intel Mac Pro is still viable for those who need a big box of PCIe GPUs.
