The real question is why did they let Mac Pro and the rest of their Mac lineup go stale and rot? A trillion dollar company and they can't chew gum and walk at the same time.
Problem is, 0.8 trillion of that is iPhone/iPad, 0.1 trillion of that is services leaving the Mac (
only the #3 best selling personal computer - small beer \s) as a bit of a "hobby" (probably not the correct stats, but you get the point). On the one hand, maybe Mac would do better if it had a dedicated subsidiary company - on the other hand, a lot of Apple's success comes from Mac/iDevice synergy (the M1 wouldn't exist without the iPhone).
Also, this is not all about Apple - the "conventional wisdom" in the '10s across the industry was that personal computers were a done deal (they were certainly becoming a mature technology, after 30 years of
insane growth and development, and had reached the
good enough point for everything up to 'casual' audio and video production) and that the future was mobile. When Tim Cook got up on stage waving an iPad, inserted foot into mouth and said "why would anybody want a PC?" (er, Tim, Macs are personal computers too!) he wasn't really going out on a limb. Remember, the whole Windows 8 debacle was partly because MS tried to make a tablet-friendly Windows.
I think some of the re-focussing on the Mac came about because it was clear that, although mobile
had become huge and eaten a chunk of the PC market, people still wanted personal computers
as well.
Was it the absence of Steve’s checks and balances?
Or did the hardware/software form & function balance become so refined that there was little room for surprise and delight innovation such that Jony Ive became blind to the true cause and fell victim to too much change for the sake of change?
Probably both. Jobs and Ive were one of the industry's great double acts. I suspect that Ive was seen as Steve Job's spiritual successor (even if he wasn't CEO material) and got "Peter principled" a bit.
However, that leaves the problems of the personal computer becoming a mature technology, "good enough" for the needs of the vast bulk of users. That obviously leads to temptation of "change for change's sake". Especially when you're starting with designs like the unibody MacBook Pro and (pre-retina) MacBook Air which had the potential to be timeless classics, were as thin as they needed to be and
really didn't need fixing. (Hence the backsliding on the new MBP design...)
Even worse when the defining feature of the existing designs is that they were
minimalist - it's very hard to make such designs
more minimalist... The 2019 Mac Pro totally dumped minimalism for a retro/steampunk look, but I don't see that being taken up by newer Macs.
I've owned 5 macs and my trashcan has lasted the longest out of all of them, and I still use it as my secondary computer. It's not powerful enough for the creative apps I use for work but it paid for itself after the first freelance project I worked on. It just won't die!
I think the main problem with the trashcan, apart from the non-appearance of updated models, was not the concept itself but that Apple needed a modular tower system
as well for customers who needed internal expansion.
They then slewed to the opposite extreme, dropped the trashcan and came out with the 2019 Mac Pro which featured such
insane expansion potential that it priced out anybody who just wanted to add a couple of PCIe cards and a hard drive.
Now we've got the Studio - which is really the trashcan done (hopefully) better - but, whups, the 27" iMac has had to go.... We've yet to see where the Mac Pro is going with Apple Silicon, but none of the current Apple Silicon processors look like they can deliver the RAM and PCIe requirements, and a new Apple Silicon die
just for the highest-end Mac Pro market would be eye-wateringly costly.
It give the impression that Apple are clinging religiously to Jobs' "four quadrant" model and are desperately avoiding any situation where there are two machines competing for the same market - which means that if you don't exactly fit into one of Apple's official customer profiles, no Mac for you. The customer profile for the Mac Pro apparently being "Making sure theres an Apple logo in the end credits for
Foundation" and the Studio Ultra being "YouTube gold-play-button-holder".
Thing is, I'm pretty sure that model was intended for saving a near-bankrupt 1998 Apple Computer Inc. that was making cameras, personal organisers, printers and a hot mess of subtly different beige "Performa" boxes with names that would have made good passwords. It
did let them stay in the computer business - but what transformed them into a $1TN legend was Jobs totally ignoring his own 'stick to your strengths' advice, going out on a limb and making a pocket music player.
