Thank you for taking the time to respond to this, and I apologise for upsetting you in any way.
Unfortunately, for every one poster like yourself who takes the time to do their own research and come to their own conclusions, there are easily many more here who are more interested in being first than in being right. You see this in the first few pages of many a forum post, and the dearth of quality in their responses is precisely the problem. They have an uninformed opinion about something they don’t understand and insist on proclaiming their opinion as being equally valid. Yet when time invariably proves them wrong, they instead choose to double down and deny that this is happening.
The reason why I disagree with them is because their understanding of what makes Apple tick is so fundamentally wrong that there really is little point in listening to what they have to say when the basis underpinning their arguments is not accurate to begin with.
Take for example the oft-parroted argument that Apple needs to offer a cheaper iphone, or risk irrelevance at the hands of cheaper Android alternatives. Am I the only one who sees the irony of self-styled pundits recommending that Apple follow a strategy which has clearly not been profitable for the competition? Or how Apple already has the ideal solution in their trade-in programme which not only makes newer iPhones more affordable, while also enabling a steady stream of second-hand iPhones that contribute towards growing Apple’s iphone install base? And yet year after year after year, “experts” continue to promote this as a panacea to a problem that Apple was never facing to begin with.
As I type this, I guess that maybe that I have gotten more than a little irritated by people making the same tired arguments repeatedly, and maybe that shows in the highly-opinionated tone I tend to take. Apple *needs* to make a round watch / folding fold / buy Netflix / random baseless claim or it’s doomed. But if they were to just take a little time to better understand Apple’s design-led culture, they would see why Apple hasn’t done any of these, and have instead created the iphone, ipad, Apple Watch, AirPods and currently working on Apple glasses.
I will see what I can do about my tone, but let’s just say I don’t have a habit of making promises I know I have a hard time keeping.
Thanks Abazigal, I appreciate your thoughtful reply.
One of the things I wonder about (I haven't tried to tease out the numbers, and I'm not sure if they're even readily available) is whether the increasing popularity of the iPad relative to the Mac (at least based on no. units sold) is not principally due (or at least not partially due) to people who use Macs moving away from them and to the iPad, but rather more due to these two phenomena:
1) Mac users adding the iPad as a second device. So it's not people moving away from the Mac, but adopting the iPad as an additional tool for specific uses.
2) A shift in the composition of the user base towards a much greater percentage of more casual users (as opposed to large percentages of Mac users moving away from the Mac to the iPad). The idea here is that, as the user base has greatly expanded, it's changed to have a much larger percentage of content consumers. Back when the Mac was relatively rare (compare to PCs), the few places where it dominated were with content creators (including scientists, coders, creatives, etc.), and these user-types remain.
So, in sum, I'm floating the idea that the reason unit sales of iPads have greatly overtaken those of Macs is not that Mac content creators are moving en masse to the iPad for content creation work, but rather because there has been a vast influx of more casual, content-consumer-focused-users into the Mac ecosystem.
Relatedly, in my opinion (those creatives who use touch screens for drawing aside), most content creaters need to input information using a keyboard and mouse or trackpad. And I would argue that, if you know you need a keyboard, the laptop (with its integrated keyboard and trackpad) is a better design. Most people, I think, don't like typing for extended periods on glass. And adding a separate keyboard and mouse or trackpad to an iPad is not as clean a system as a laptop. Given that I think the need for keyboard entry isn't going away anytime soon, I don't believe the desire for a laptop is going away anytime soon either. Hence, until we get direct neural interfaces, I think the laptop is here to stay alongside iPads.
Finally, it should be noted that you can't compare the desire for Macs vs. iPads purely by looking at number of units sold, because the former cost, on average, ~3x as much (that's why annual dollar sales figures for the Mac are actually higher than for the iPad). If they cost the same, the unit sales figures would certainly be much closer.
