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I am guessing that we have come to a point where the majority of our work is either done in the browser
what comes around, goes around. Back when I started life in data processing (as it was used to be called), we had dumb terminals connecting to mainframes. In a weird sort of way, isn't that we're doing now? Browsers connected to powerful computers, where the actual heavy lifting is being done?

We may be looking at a point where the demand for more powerful desktop and laptops are diminishing. Case in point: my company has made it a stated goal that all efforts are to be made for new enterprise applications to be cloud based and not hosted on premise. Gaming is moving to streaming, not there yet but its moving.

The need for overly powerful desktop computers is shrinking
 
what comes around, goes around. Back when I started life in data processing (as it was used to be called), we had dumb terminals connecting to mainframes. In a weird sort of way, isn't that we're doing now? Browsers connected to powerful computers, where the actual heavy lifting is being done?

We may be looking at a point where the demand for more powerful desktop and laptops are diminishing. Case in point: my company has made it a stated goal that all efforts are to be made for new enterprise applications to be cloud based and not hosted on premise. Gaming is moving to streaming, not there yet but its moving.

The need for overly powerful desktop computers is shrinking
Exactly - There is a market for Chromebook for example.
 
So it’s funny, I checked just to see how much I was speculating, and our uni recommends either an XPS 13 or a MacBook Air for students. Students in some specific majors have other recommendations, say computer science or biology, but those are the standards. I haven’t seen an XPS in person recently, but I suspect they’re more or less competitive with the apples in build quality. So that begs the question why the apples are so much more popular - among our undergraduates - than the Dells. I don’t have an answer. For years, getting IT to support Macs was like pulling teeth, and they still don’t get it entirely. Sometimes you luck out, but often not so much. I had them get me a trashcan Mac Pro when I started and a 4K display: I was working on a retina MBp and using the lower res screens for a desktop was annoying, and my students were starting to do some higher res projects. They capitulated, but I was largely on my own for support.
I feel like we're maybe approaching the question from the wrong angle (revealing our age) - maybe the question isn't "why are they they picking the Mac?" but "why would they pick the Dell?"

Once upon a time, there was something... marginalizing... about Macs. You walked into the computer store in 1994, there was a big section for PC compatibles, a small section about Macs, and basically, everything was different. You wanted a modem? External serial for the Mac, internal ISA for the PC compatible. A monitor? DB-15 Apple magic for the Mac, VGA for the PC compatible. A printer? Serial for the Mac, parallel for the PC compatible. Keyboard/mouse? Macs were ADB, PC compatibles were AT or PS/2. Software, obviously, was all different and back then, at least, no one bundled both Mac and DOS/Windows versions in the same box. (And for good reason - software had hundreds/thousands of pages of paper manuals back then, so duplicating that would have been a big deal) Even floppy disks were largely shipped pre-formatted, so you had the box "for Mac" and the box "for DOS".

What was the first version of the classic Mac OS that included PC Exchange and could mount FAT floppies? Probably 7.5 (Wikipedia says 7 Pro, but who bought 7 Pro?). So that was another aspect of the marginalization - it was not easy for a Mac user to exchange, say, a word processing document with a Windows user.

I was a Mac guy in the early 1990s until my dad decided to go DOS/Windows instead of replacing a Mac SE with a 630 or a 6100. For him, the breaking point was when he realized that CD-ROMs (which were the cool, trendy thing... funny how they didn't stay that way for that long) were platform-specific. He just figured that if you were on Mac you would have 10% of the CD-ROMs that you would get on DOS/Windows. Everybody I knew who was a Mac guy went Windows during the dark era for similar reasons. Win9x, especially, became "good enough" that you just didn't want to deal with the marginalization. And, of course, as users migrated away from Mac, so did developers, creating a bit of a spiral effect...

The "Think Different" campaign in a way nicely caps off that era, because indeed, to be a Mac user in that era and to stay a Mac user, you were thinking different. And every time you needed anything, you were reminded that you were in a small minority. Choosing a Mac in that era meant that you never knew what roadblock you might encounter a few months later. I remember, for example, exam-writing software - in 2005, it only ran on Windows - so if you were a Mac user, you handwrote your exam - within a few years, it supported Intel Macs too.

This era of having a Mac meant being marginalized ended... a long time ago. Hardware marginalization largely ended with the switch to USB, "industry-standard" display connectors, etc in the late 1990s. The difficulties exchanging data with others were largely addressed when everybody refocused everything around TCP/IP, SMTP, etc and Apple threw out all their cool innovative things like type/creator codes in favour of being a good little citizen in a world dominated by TCP/IP, UNIX-derived standards and Windows-derived standards. Also Unicode - there used to be issues moving accented characters between Windows and Mac. And software marginalization has been on a steady decrease - first, many things are now based on web browsers or web-adjacent platforms like Electron, but second, Macs now have enough of an installed base that third-party developers for most things (or at least most things that consumers/students/etc will encounter) enthusiastically support Mac. Lots and lots of Windows-only programs were ported to Mac starting after the Intel transition. Steve Jobs used to be worried about the lack of a good web browser for the Mac - yet, today, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc all treat the Mac as a first tier platform. And lots of weird/custom/dated software is now run on remote Windows servers through things like Citrix environments, which Macs can connect to just as well as Windows machines.

So, if you are an 18 year old student needing a computer for post-secondary graduation, you literally were not born at the time of peak Mac marginalization. You've been surrounded by Apple phones since you were, oh, 4. Your elementary/high school is probably more likely to have had iPads than either Windows or Mac. If anything, the Dell running Windows probably seems a little... weirder... to you than the Mac. So, the funny thing is, the same factors that drove people away from Macs 20 years ago... now, if anything, make the Mac the "default" choice and you'd have to be a bit different to get the Dell. And frankly, I think it is likely that your first serious exposure to Windowsland, serious Windows productivity software like even Outlook, etc will be in the workplace because many workplaces, especially smaller ones, are still operating on roughly the same technological environment as in the early-2000s - Windows, MS Office/Exchange/Office 365, Active Directory, industry-specific Windows software, etc.
 
Does Apple make more money if I buy a MacMini and a third party screen, than by selling me a 27" iMac? I am totally dumbfounded by the logic behind discontinuing the 27" iMac unless it is more profitable for them to sell a MacMini than the iMac.
The Mac Studio and Studio Display is a replacement for the high end 27 inch iMac and the iMac Pro. The benefit is that you are no longer stuck with a perfectly good 5k display attached to a useless computer when the iMac is out of date. And the 27 inch iMac with similar specs as the studio were just as expensive as the Studio combo. For what you are getting, $3600 is not bad.
The Mac mini is not the parity device for iMac 27, that's the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio eliminates the need for 27 iMac and iMac Pro.

I don’t at all believe the Studio is intended to replace the iMac long term. I think the studio is intended to (temporarily) replace the Mac Pro and iMac Pro while Apple figures out their higher-end models. Wether it stays around is TBD as it seems to be popular. I don’t at all think Apple ever intended customers to abandon their elegant and sleek all-in-one computer (which is a hallmark of Apple since day one) for a more modular, less elegant, system. I think this was created out of necessity - maybe temporarily maybe not.

I have my doubts about a low-end 27” iMac, but from several rumors, we have been told that a larger iMac was supposed to come (or is coming) with ProMotion and XDR. A 27” 5K display with those specs 1) is very new 2) expensive 3) requires a lot of bandwidth 4) requires a powerful GPU if running professional apps 5) requires cooling.

It’s a tall order putting this all into an all-in-one enclosure. If apple does brand the larger iMac as “iMac Pro” it also must completely destroy the 2017 iMac Pro in every way. Right now the ultra chip does that, but when compared to a 5 year old computer, it’s not “earth shattering”.

You also have to factor in how apple releases these computers. Ideally, you want to release ALL M1 products before M2, and then All M2 before M3. However you also don’t want to delay the next generation, so this puts a tight window for apple to release these products - or be forced to wait until the next window.

I believe many of the above factors, in addition to supply issues, are why we haven’t seen any successor to the iMac Pro and/or the 27” iMac.
 
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And I think it's an interesting counter-factual. Look at what happened to 68K - after the 68040, everybody pretty much became convinced that CISC architectures were a dead end, and 68K buyers fragmented. Apple went PowerPC hoping to get some economies of scale with IBM, NeXT went... Intel?, Sun built SPARC, Atari/Amiga failed, etc.

A decade later, everybody who had been 68K was basically either i) dead, or ii) adopting x86/amd64 (i.e. the architecture they all rejected when dumping 68k a decade earlier).

If Motorola had "tinkered" with the 68K Intel-style for 30 years, maybe we would have two vibrant worlds today. But instead, they blew up their non-embedded CPU business and their customers basically all flopped.

And... didn't John Sculley say that one of his biggest mistakes was that Apple hadn't gone x86 instead of PowerPC? PowerPC was cool for 5 years, an albatross for another 5, and then abandoned faster than anyone imagined.

Meanwhile, in the counter-factual world where 68K hadn't been abandoned, we'd probably all be using Copland-derived MacOS on the 68440 or whatever the current iteration of the 68K would be. And maybe we could actually open up MacWrite 1.0 on our 68440s...
The problem with the 68k was indeed lack of direction, similar to Intel. They don't seem to have a roadmap that's reliable.
Meanwhile, Apple seems to be a common thread. Apple transitions when it benefits them. Apple has abandoned 4 product platforms.

This is due to the MACH Kernel being Processor Independent, NeXTCube was designed around the 68030/68882 Coprocessor but NeXTSTEP could run on Intel, IBM PPC, etc. This is why Apple quickly abandoned the 68k for the PPC and the Intel transition was so quick. MACH has binary libraries for almost any processor it wants.

It basically allows MacOS X (Originally NeXTSTEP) to be quickly retooled and redeployed on any hardware with little to no compiling. That's the real future of computing is processor independence. The machine is nothing more than a Terminal for software. I bet Steve envisioned SaaS with Mac OS X streaming to machines eventually as a NETBOOT or streamingOS where the device is merely a terminal for a thin client.

Being married to a platform means you are stuck with all the adv and disadv of that platform. But MACH basically means Apple can rapidly drop failing or inconsistent platforms for whatever they decide, so long as the binary can be written for MACH.
 
Hah.

You don't understand how transitions happen in PC compatible-land vs in Apple land.

In Apple land, Apple launches new thing, provides an emulator that makes new thing compatible with old thing for a while, then people adjust their software to the new thing. Then compatibility with old thing potentially goes away. That's how they did the PowerPC transition, the MacOS X transition, the Intel transition, the Apple silicon transition.

In Windows/PC land, people buy the new chips to run the old software, which it runs better than the old chips while the new abilities are unused. 98% of 386s and a good chunk of 486s went to the e-waste pile having never run a 32-bit protected mode operating system, only DOS/Win3.11. The first ~5-7 years of amd64 chips ran 32-bit XP, 32-bit Vista, and maybe 32-bit Windows 7 and never ran a 64-bit OS before going into the e-waste pile. Etc.

Every time Windows-land has tried an Apple-style transition (Itanium, ARM Surface, etc), it has been a colossal flop. The one transition that was a success, from DOS/Win3.11 to 32-bit NT, it took about eight years and Microsoft had to engineer an entire OS family (Win9x) the purpose of which was to provide enough compatibility with both DOS/Win3.11 world and NT land that people would be able to transition slowly. And until XP came out and forced the low-end-hardware vendors and game developers to support NT, if you were in NT-land, you had to be careful buying software and peripherals because a lot of vendors did not support the NT-family OSes.

And there's a simple reason for this. In order to do a transition, you need four things:
1. The new hardware.
2. An operating system compatible with the new hardware.
3. Drivers, both for things inside the system and for things that people will plug into it, and
4. Application software.

If you look at Apple's transitions, Apple can deliver #1-3 on launch day. If you are on March 14, 1994, picking up your shiny new Power Mac, you have the hardware, you have an operating system that runs on it, you have drivers for whatever video/audio/SCSI/networking/etc componentry is in the thing, Apple has provided enough compatibility with third-party peripherals you care about (e.g. the printers that work on your Quadra will work fine on your Power Mac). The only thing you are missing is #4, and Apple has provided you with an emulator that is 'good enough'. Same thing if you are picking up your Intel MBP on January 10, 2006. And because Apple can start building an installed base on day 1, the Adobes and Microsofts and other third-party developers look at this and say "okay, this new platform is happening, time to start recompiling our code guys".

If you look at PC land, ever since IBM stopped setting the standard in the 286 days, different people are responsible for each. New processor architecture is released on a given day; that's nice, there aren't going to be any operating systems. Microsoft may recompile NT for your architecture on whatever timeline they feel like. Linux folks may compile their world for your architecture, again on whatever timeline they feel like (and just because the kernel boots on your thing doesn't mean that the established distributors like Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/etc will have a distribution for your architecture for a few years.) NetBSD folks will probably port their OS to your architecture; other BSDs may or may not, and even if they do, you're probably not going to be a "Tier 1" (in FBSD speak) architecture for a few years at least.

Then you need drivers. No one is going to be coding drivers for printers and scanners and network controllers and GPUs and whatever else for a platform that doesn't exist. So, on the day that Microsoft ships NT for your architecture, congratulations, you can't plug any hardware into it. Then, of course, you have the software problem, but your OS vendor can at least provide an emulator for that. Maybe. And all the third party software developers are watching this clusterf*** of a transition that's going nowhere and they think they probably should wait to see how things flesh out before they assign developers to porting their software.

If you want to see this in action, look at how many developers support i) 64-bit Windows, ii) ARM Windows, and iii) Apple Silicon. You can barely get 64-bit Adobe Acrobat for Windows/arm64; the same thing has been available in 64-bit Intel for macOS for years and in 64-bit Apple Silicon for a while. Is there ANY third party software for ARM Windows, other than maybe some open sourcey things like VLC that get compiled for everything? And actually, VLC doesn't have a release version for ARM Windows, just nightly builds.

Meanwhile, with a kludge like AMD64, AMD releases the processors, they keep running 32-bit XP with existing drivers, software, etc. Which they do better than the other x86-compatible processors on the market. A while later, MS releases amd64 "XP", which no one uses because there is almost no driver support for it. But at least it exists and MS indicates that amd64 is going to be a supported architecture going forward. Vista/7 deliver equivalent feature sets and experiences on both x86 and amd64; by the launch of Windows 7, there are enough drivers for amd64 that consumer machines start to be preloaded with amd64. Meanwhile, businesses are still cautious - my dad, for example, got a new work laptop in 2011 with a sandy bridge Intel that was running 32-bit Windows 7. That's eight years after the Athlon 64 shipped. By... 2013-2015, amd64 is established enough that businesses are now abandoning 32-bit. And it is only in 2021, with the launch of Windows 11, that Microsoft stops shipping 32-bit Windows. So... eighteen years.

If anybody thinks that Windows-land and the established base of Windows software can move away from x86/amd64/etc, they are dreaming. More likely to move to Chrome OS on arm than Windows on arm. Windows on ARM will never get off the ground because... you have no installed base to motivate people to write drivers, no installed base to motivate people to port their application software, and you have nothing to motivate people to buy the devices so you can't build an installed base. Meanwhile HP/Dell/Lenovo keep shipping millions of amd64 devices every month. Microsoft couldn't even get touchscreens added to the Windows platform when they went big on touch with Windows 8 - Lenovo/HP/Dell basically said "no, we don't think people want to pay for touchscreens", 80% or whatever of Windows machines they shipped had no touchscreens, and... here we are, a decade after the launch of Windows 8, and touch on Windows remains a joke.

And Microsoft may be "dead serious" about Windows on arm. Just like they were "dead serious" about a smartphone platform when they realized that smartphones were going to muscle in on the PC. You can be as "dead serious" about something as you want - if you can't ship a functional product that enough people are willing to pay for that a third-party ecosystem builds around your platform, you are doomed.
And Windows on ARM has even less of an ecosystem than Windows Phone...especially since Windows Phone had at least somewhat of that Microsoft mystique from the 90s (people like my dad, when he got his first iPhone, expected that Microsoft would come out with a phone and everyone would switch, because, well... that had been how things had gone the previous couple of decades - Apple invents something, Microsoft copies/"improves"/mainstreams/out-markets/etc it, everybody switches to the Microsoft version. The idea that Microsoft would enter a market pioneered by Apple and... completely flop... and end up exiting in shame was... not really conceivable before Windows 8/Phone.)
Well, yeah, Microsoft is stuck in the past. That's a joke older than time.

I argue Microsoft has become much more nimble and sensitive to market direction under Satya. Microsoft's OneDrive, Azure, Akamai, and even Xbox products have embraced SaaS, making the hardware more of a terminal running a thin client to access software in the cloud than a full fledged OS on device.

ARMv8 has the power efficiency Microsoft has always desired out of Intel, but Intel was always pursuing refrigerator power efficiency to make a processor so powerful it could move mountains. However, Microsoft has seen Apple and Google completely bypassing them in the NextGen of PC world. PCs are dying.

Windows desktop sales are essentially gaming PCs.
Windows laptop sales are basically enterprise IT deployments, and they are low end Core i5 or i3.
ChromeBooks are a massive threat to Windows PC dominance on the low end due to their low price.
And Macs eat up the high end in the education, art/music industry, and the digital content industry (influencers, YouTube).

The major computing device is no longer Windows PCs at all, it is Android and iOS devices. Microsoft wants to maintain a market dominance in software such as Office, so they play along and are very nimble.
From Microsoft's perspective, maintaining x86-64 builds of Office on top of ARMv8 Windows builds, on top of ARM Mac OS and Android? There's one VERY SORE THUMB sticking out there. It is why Office365 all but abandoned one time purchases of Office as a suite. They prefer your monthly subscription.

I think Intel needs to realize that Desktops are done as a major purchase, and Laptops will decline to low end purchases only. Other than gaming and large IT deployments, laptops are effectively neutered in the market. And if you need a powerful laptop for a 1099 career, you are more than likely a digital content producer and that is done on a Mac. Large gaming devs are large IT deployments anyways for MDM and security.

The future of growth in computers is ultra portable Smartphones and tablets on the side. And Intel doesn't have a solution for either of those, but ARM does.
 
The problem with the 68k was indeed lack of direction, similar to Intel. They don't seem to have a roadmap that's reliable.
Meanwhile, Apple seems to be a common thread. Apple transitions when it benefits them. Apple has abandoned 4 product platforms.

This is due to the MACH Kernel being Processor Independent, NeXTCube was designed around the 68030/68882 Coprocessor but NeXTSTEP could run on Intel, IBM PPC, etc. This is why Apple quickly abandoned the 68k for the PPC and the Intel transition was so quick. MACH has binary libraries for almost any processor it wants.

It basically allows MacOS X (Originally NeXTSTEP) to be quickly retooled and redeployed on any hardware with little to no compiling. That's the real future of computing is processor independence. The machine is nothing more than a Terminal for software. I bet Steve envisioned SaaS with Mac OS X streaming to machines eventually as a NETBOOT or streamingOS where the device is merely a terminal for a thin client.

Being married to a platform means you are stuck with all the adv and disadv of that platform. But MACH basically means Apple can rapidly drop failing or inconsistent platforms for whatever they decide, so long as the binary can be written for MACH.
One small detail - the 68K to PowerPC transition happened years before Mach, OS X, NeXTSTEP, etc were at Apple. If anything, the NeXT world was ported to PowerPC away from 68k/x86 because Apple was heavily invested in PowerPC at the time of the acquisition.

But, yes, I think that since adopting the NeXT/Mach model, Apple has always kept their options open. They had MacOS X for Intel in a secret lab for years. I'm sure they had full MacOS X running on ARM iPhone/iPad chips since... the very beginning. Then they wait - the time that they've always chosen to make the jump is when emulated old software on the new platform will run at roughly the same speed (or faster) than on the old platform and native software on the new platform will have a big performance gain. That's how they silence the naysayers, and each hardware transition had its set of naysayers - if anything, the Intel transition probably had the most naysayers (because the true Apple fans who had stuck with Apple through the dark era were absolutely convinced that PowerPC was always better and that x86 was garbage - I don't think anyone had that degree of loyalty to either Intel or 68K. The naysayers on Apple silicon were not 'true Apple fans', more Apple skeptics who, having never seen a desktop-grade ARM chip, didn't imagine one could exist) and... those naysayers changed their tune real fast once they saw the benchmarks from the first Intel MBPs.

(Then again, maybe that attitude predates NeXT/Mach - there was also a secret port of System 7 to x86 in the early 1990s. But worth noting - in the 486/early Pentium era, x86 did not have a performance advantage over 68K that would satisfy the "emulated old software at roughly the same speed", "big gain on native software" goal. PowerPC promised that, in part because I believe the first shipping PPCs outperformed contamporaneous x86 quite substantially.)
 
Well, yeah, Microsoft is stuck in the past. That's a joke older than time.

I argue Microsoft has become much more nimble and sensitive to market direction under Satya. Microsoft's OneDrive, Azure, Akamai, and even Xbox products have embraced SaaS, making the hardware more of a terminal running a thin client to access software in the cloud than a full fledged OS on device.

ARMv8 has the power efficiency Microsoft has always desired out of Intel, but Intel was always pursuing refrigerator power efficiency to make a processor so powerful it could move mountains. However, Microsoft has seen Apple and Google completely bypassing them in the NextGen of PC world. PCs are dying.

Windows desktop sales are essentially gaming PCs.
Windows laptop sales are basically enterprise IT deployments, and they are low end Core i5 or i3.
ChromeBooks are a massive threat to Windows PC dominance on the low end due to their low price.
And Macs eat up the high end in the education, art/music industry, and the digital content industry (influencers, YouTube).

The major computing device is no longer Windows PCs at all, it is Android and iOS devices. Microsoft wants to maintain a market dominance in software such as Office, so they play along and are very nimble.
From Microsoft's perspective, maintaining x86-64 builds of Office on top of ARMv8 Windows builds, on top of ARM Mac OS and Android? There's one VERY SORE THUMB sticking out there. It is why Office365 all but abandoned one time purchases of Office as a suite. They prefer your monthly subscription.

I think Intel needs to realize that Desktops are done as a major purchase, and Laptops will decline to low end purchases only. Other than gaming and large IT deployments, laptops are effectively neutered in the market. And if you need a powerful laptop for a 1099 career, you are more than likely a digital content producer and that is done on a Mac. Large gaming devs are large IT deployments anyways for MDM and security.

The future of growth in computers is ultra portable Smartphones and tablets on the side. And Intel doesn't have a solution for either of those, but ARM does.
The thing is, Microsoft is stuck - they cannot create platforms. They can launch all the Windows Phones and the ARM Windows tablets they want, but that's not going to change the fact that the people that want Windows want x86 Windows on a traditional form factor. And that's what Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc will keep selling them until the end of time regardless of Microsoft's goals/fears/etc. And the people who want something other than x86 Windows in a traditional form factor... have no reason to buy it from Microsoft. Every attempt by Microsoft to create a platform other than Xbox has flopped, and Xbox has a nice advantage that the norm in console gaming traditionally was that you throw out your platform and start largely from scratch every 5 years, so every 5 years, every market player has a chance to start over and compete roughly from scratch.

So yes, Microsoft under Satya Nadella has, I think, tried to position itself to earn subscription revenue regardless of what client OS you use. Better than being entirely shut out of a growing number of people's lives/wallets because those people just don't need MS Office or other services badly enough to choose the Microsoft OS/platform.

You forgot one additional factor - VDI environments like Citrix, Windows 365, Amazon Workspaces, etc. To the extent you need older/specialized/etc Windows software, you can run it in a well-managed Windows environment somewhere far away. And the client... doesn't have to be a Windows laptop. Right now, it often still is, but if Apple added good external monitor support to the iPad (dual monitors, non-mirroring, etc), you could easily throw out all the Windows laptops and have people connect to those VDI environments from iPads. (Before someone points it out, yes, I believe there were big improvements in the newest iPadOS on the newest M-series iPad Pros - haven't had a chance to try it)

In many ways, I would argue the microcomputer (aka PC, though I don't want to call it PC because I don't just mean Windows) is going the way of the mainframe - certainly not cool anymore, no one really develops new things for it, and it's used largely for legacy compatibility with important business things developed long ago when there were no "better"/"cooler"/"trendier" alternative platforms. That being said... just because something isn't cool anymore doesn't mean there isn't money in it - IBM certainly makes a lot more money on mainframes than they did in microcomputers (which they exited almost 20 years ago).

Keep in mind, too, that with Apple Silicon, Apple has finished building all the infrastructure to swallow the Mac into iOS/iPad OS (i.e. run your serious keyboard/mouse productivity apps from an iOS device). All you need is a Thunderbolt cable out of an iPhone into a Studio Display-type docking-type thing and... boom, you can run all your "Mac" apps off the iPhone. The groundwork is all there - I think they don't want to ship it because, well, they enjoy selling you a Mac and an iPhone more than they enjoy selling you an iPhone and an external docking thingy - but Apple has quietly migrated/consolidated their platforms in the past decade such that they have the ability to do it. And I suspect the framework is all there to do "universal" apps - if you open the app on an undocked iPhone, you get the touch iPhone version, but if you open it from the Finder in your docked iPhone, you get the Mac version with the keyboard/mouse interface.

If docked smartphones become the future of productivity computing (which I think Microsoft has also anticipated but was unable to do anything to stay relevant in), then that's the (slow gradual) end of Windows as an end-user client OS.
 
I don’t at all believe the Studio is intended to replace the iMac long term. I think the studio is intended to (temporarily) replace the Mac Pro and iMac Pro while Apple figures out their higher-end models. Wether it stays around is TBD as it seems to be popular. I don’t at all think Apple ever intended customers to abandon their elegant and sleek all-in-one computer (which is a hallmark of Apple since day one) for a more modular, less elegant, system. I think this was created out of necessity - maybe temporarily maybe not.

I have my doubts about a low-end 27” iMac, but from several rumors, we have been told that a larger iMac was supposed to come (or is coming) with ProMotion and XDR. A 27” 5K display with those specs 1) is very new 2) expensive 3) requires a lot of bandwidth 4) requires a powerful GPU if running professional apps 5) requires cooling.

It’s a tall order putting this all into an all-in-one enclosure. If apple does brand the larger iMac as “iMac Pro” it also must completely destroy the 2017 iMac Pro in every way. Right now the ultra chip does that, but when compared to a 5 year old computer, it’s not “earth shattering”.

You also have to factor in how apple releases these computers. Ideally, you want to release ALL M1 products before M2, and then All M2 before M3. However you also don’t want to delay the next generation, so this puts a tight window for apple to release these products - or be forced to wait until the next window.

I believe many of the above factors, in addition to supply issues, are why we haven’t seen any successor to the iMac Pro and/or the 27” iMac.
Like I have said before, Apple has brought the iMac back to what it originally was made for, a consumer level computer. If Apple releases a 27 inch iMac, I think the only upgrade will be screen size. The iMac has gone back to a consumer device. The Mac Studio and display is the Pro-Sumer device and the Mac Pro will continue to be the ultimate pro workstation (when it gets updated)
 
Like I have said before, Apple has brought the iMac back to what it originally was made for, a consumer level computer. If Apple releases a 27 inch iMac, I think the only upgrade will be screen size. The iMac has gone back to a consumer device. The Mac Studio and display is the Pro-Sumer device and the Mac Pro will continue to be the ultimate pro workstation (when it gets updated)
Interesting question - how, inflation-adjusted, does the Mac Studio compare price-wise to the G3/G4 Power Macs? Weren't G4 Power Macs starting at like $1699USD at one point?

There was an interesting paradigm shift at some point - iMacs went up-market and Mac Pros went way way way way upmarket. Not sure when it started - the iMac G5? Not offering a single-processor Core 2-based Mac Pro, leaving the iMac, especially when it moved away from laptop CPUs, as the mainstream Intel Mac desktop? The trash can Mac Pro? People needing productivity desktops (if there are still any left) presumably went to 27" iMacs unless they were doing Really Serious Demanding Work that justified spending 2.5X more for the Mac Pro. And Apple encouraged this to some extent - you could even get 10 gigabit Ethernet on an iMac! And as the Mac Pro became more and more upmarket, I'm sure sales volume dropped dramatically compared to, say, the Power Mac G4 Quicksilver or MDD, leading to under-investment and stupidly long product lifecycles, leading to more people buying iMacs, etc.

Maybe they are reversing this shift now...but it's worth noting, in those days, there was no "ultimate pro workstation". Which almost begs the question - if there was no need for an "ultimate pro workstation" in the days when the pro was expected to get the top-end Power Mac G4 and the normal productivity user was expected to get the lower-end Power Mac G4s, is there really a need for an "ultimate pro workstation" beyond the top-end Mac Studio now? I wonder if they might not quietly be exploring whether they can just avoid the R&D of an "M2 Extreme" or whatever and never replace the Mac Pro...
 
I feel like we're maybe approaching the question from the wrong angle (revealing our age) - maybe the question isn't "why are they they picking the Mac?" but "why would they pick the Dell?"

Once upon a time, there was something... marginalizing... about Macs. You walked into the computer store in 1994, there was a big section for PC compatibles, a small section about Macs, and basically, everything was different. You wanted a modem? External serial for the Mac, internal ISA for the PC compatible. A monitor? DB-15 Apple magic for the Mac, VGA for the PC compatible. A printer? Serial for the Mac, parallel for the PC compatible. Keyboard/mouse? Macs were ADB, PC compatibles were AT or PS/2. Software, obviously, was all different and back then, at least, no one bundled both Mac and DOS/Windows versions in the same box. (And for good reason - software had hundreds/thousands of pages of paper manuals back then, so duplicating that would have been a big deal) Even floppy disks were largely shipped pre-formatted, so you had the box "for Mac" and the box "for DOS".

What was the first version of the classic Mac OS that included PC Exchange and could mount FAT floppies? Probably 7.5 (Wikipedia says 7 Pro, but who bought 7 Pro?). So that was another aspect of the marginalization - it was not easy for a Mac user to exchange, say, a word processing document with a Windows user.

I was a Mac guy in the early 1990s until my dad decided to go DOS/Windows instead of replacing a Mac SE with a 630 or a 6100. For him, the breaking point was when he realized that CD-ROMs (which were the cool, trendy thing... funny how they didn't stay that way for that long) were platform-specific. He just figured that if you were on Mac you would have 10% of the CD-ROMs that you would get on DOS/Windows. Everybody I knew who was a Mac guy went Windows during the dark era for similar reasons. Win9x, especially, became "good enough" that you just didn't want to deal with the marginalization. And, of course, as users migrated away from Mac, so did developers, creating a bit of a spiral effect...

The "Think Different" campaign in a way nicely caps off that era, because indeed, to be a Mac user in that era and to stay a Mac user, you were thinking different. And every time you needed anything, you were reminded that you were in a small minority. Choosing a Mac in that era meant that you never knew what roadblock you might encounter a few months later. I remember, for example, exam-writing software - in 2005, it only ran on Windows - so if you were a Mac user, you handwrote your exam - within a few years, it supported Intel Macs too.

This era of having a Mac meant being marginalized ended... a long time ago. Hardware marginalization largely ended with the switch to USB, "industry-standard" display connectors, etc in the late 1990s. The difficulties exchanging data with others were largely addressed when everybody refocused everything around TCP/IP, SMTP, etc and Apple threw out all their cool innovative things like type/creator codes in favour of being a good little citizen in a world dominated by TCP/IP, UNIX-derived standards and Windows-derived standards. Also Unicode - there used to be issues moving accented characters between Windows and Mac. And software marginalization has been on a steady decrease - first, many things are now based on web browsers or web-adjacent platforms like Electron, but second, Macs now have enough of an installed base that third-party developers for most things (or at least most things that consumers/students/etc will encounter) enthusiastically support Mac. Lots and lots of Windows-only programs were ported to Mac starting after the Intel transition. Steve Jobs used to be worried about the lack of a good web browser for the Mac - yet, today, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc all treat the Mac as a first tier platform. And lots of weird/custom/dated software is now run on remote Windows servers through things like Citrix environments, which Macs can connect to just as well as Windows machines.

So, if you are an 18 year old student needing a computer for post-secondary graduation, you literally were not born at the time of peak Mac marginalization. You've been surrounded by Apple phones since you were, oh, 4. Your elementary/high school is probably more likely to have had iPads than either Windows or Mac. If anything, the Dell running Windows probably seems a little... weirder... to you than the Mac. So, the funny thing is, the same factors that drove people away from Macs 20 years ago... now, if anything, make the Mac the "default" choice and you'd have to be a bit different to get the Dell. And frankly, I think it is likely that your first serious exposure to Windowsland, serious Windows productivity software like even Outlook, etc will be in the workplace because many workplaces, especially smaller ones, are still operating on roughly the same technological environment as in the early-2000s - Windows, MS Office/Exchange/Office 365, Active Directory, industry-specific Windows software, etc.
Also, it’s foolish not to realize the goal was to make apple a lifestyle brand, like BMW or Moet, through aggressive marketing, which succeeded. No student is going to be able to show off how sophisticated they are with a Dell, or how much like their fraternity and sorority mates they are if they have something different.

And yes, I wonder how that transition goes when they go from social science major to working in their parents’ or frat brothers’ finance firms on Wall Street, where I assume it’s still a PC driven culture.
 
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Also, it’s foolish not to realize the goal was to make apple a lifestyle brand, like BMW or Moet, through aggressive marketing, which succeeded. No student is going to be able to show off how sophisticated they are with a Dell, or how much like their fraternity and sorority mates they are if they have something different.

And yes, I wonder how that transition goes when they go from social science major to working in their parents’ or frat brothers’ finance firms on Wall Street, where I assume it’s still a PC driven culture.
Yup, and the "lifestyle brand" thing started after the return of Steve Jobs. The reversing of the Apple logo on the back of laptops (so it looks right-side-up when you are looking at the classroom, instead of right-side-up when the user is placing the laptop on his/her desk), replacing the happy Mac icon and most other visible parts of the boot process with a big full screen Apple logo, etc. And, especially in the last decade and a bit after they switched to the aluminum/unibody enclosure, "freezing" the industrial design in the same way that, say, Porsche has frozen the design of the 911 - yes, they update it every few years, but the core styling hasn't changed and both a brand new model and a 10 (or, in the Porsche case, 30) year old model clearly communicate the brand. And, of course, marketing Apple products by setting up Apple stores in the malls that sold higher-end fashion. And I presume there were other things, e.g. product placement deals with TV shows/movies/etc (e.g. doesn't Elle Woods go to law school with a clamshell iBook?).

That's the thing that our younger friend doesn't seem to appreciate - Apple really became a lifestyle/luxury brand that you bought to show off how sophisticated you are sometimes between 2003-2007. No one bought a IIfx, a Quadra 840av, or even a PowerBook 540 as a lifestyle item. Some people bought SEs and IIsis and LCs and PowerBook 145s because they heard (very correctly) Macs were "a lot easier to use". But the lifestyle item thing started when the first Windows-compatible iPod launched (because almost none of its intended buyers had Macs), then expanded to laptops roughly around the time of the Intel MacBook launch (I knew one fashionista who was replacing her Dell or Toshiba with a Mac laptop in 2004 or early 2005 or so, but she was ahead of the curve on that one... and I remember thinking how strange it was that she would be interested in a PowerBook G4). The other thing that I would note that contributed to this is people taking laptops to class, the library, etc - that became much more of a mainstream thing in the mid-2000s, at least in my experience, with the rise of wifi everywhere, laptops being smaller, etc. Before then, if you're rarely taking your laptop away from home, the fashion implications of the university computer store Toshiba or IBM or Dell are... not really there.

My sense is that they probably look at the Windows machines at their work the same way that 25 years earlier, someone would have looked at an IBM terminal on their desk at a bank or other such organization - i.e. a "wow things feel dated here" feeling. And if they have some political pull, they start lobbying for BYOD policies...
 
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Yup, and the "lifestyle brand" thing started after the return of Steve Jobs. The reversing of the Apple logo on the back of laptops (so it looks right-side-up when you are looking at the classroom, instead of right-side-up when the user is placing the laptop on his/her desk), replacing the happy Mac icon and most other visible parts of the boot process with a big full screen Apple logo, etc. And, especially in the last decade and a bit after they switched to the aluminum/unibody enclosure, "freezing" the industrial design in the same way that, say, Porsche has frozen the design of the 911 - yes, they update it every few years, but the core styling hasn't changed and both a brand new model and a 10 (or, in the Porsche case, 30) year old model clearly communicate the brand. And, of course, marketing Apple products by setting up Apple stores in the malls that sold higher-end fashion. And I presume there were other things, e.g. product placement deals with TV shows/movies/etc (e.g. doesn't Elle Woods go to law school with a clamshell iBook?).

That's the thing that our younger friend doesn't seem to appreciate - Apple really became a lifestyle/luxury brand that you bought to show off how sophisticated you are sometimes between 2003-2007. No one bought a IIfx, a Quadra 840av, or even a PowerBook 540 as a lifestyle item. Some people bought SEs and IIsis and LCs and PowerBook 145s because they heard (very correctly) Macs were "a lot easier to use". But the lifestyle item thing started when the first Windows-compatible iPod launched (because almost none of its intended buyers had Macs), then expanded to laptops roughly around the time of the Intel MacBook launch (I knew one fashionista who was replacing her Dell or Toshiba with a Mac laptop in 2004 or early 2005 or so, but she was ahead of the curve on that one... and I remember thinking how strange it was that she would be interested in a PowerBook G4). The other thing that I would note that contributed to this is people taking laptops to class, the library, etc - that became much more of a mainstream thing in the mid-2000s, at least in my experience, with the rise of wifi everywhere, laptops being smaller, etc. Before then, if you're rarely taking your laptop away from home, the fashion implications of the university computer store Toshiba or IBM or Dell are... not really there.

My sense is that they probably look at the Windows machines at their work the same way that 25 years earlier, someone would have looked at an IBM terminal on their desk at a bank or other such organization - i.e. a "wow things feel dated here" feeling. And if they have some political pull, they start lobbying for BYOD policies...
Exactly. And as you remarked earlier, can you imagine 11,000 USD for a IIfx? Incredible. I remember those days, people spoke about it like they talk about Feraris.
 
Exactly. And as you remarked earlier, can you imagine 11,000 USD for a IIfx? Incredible. I remember those days, people spoke about it like they talk about Feraris.
Yup, but... the IIfx was a professional machine for graphic designers.

If you could do a Photoshop filter in 2 hours on your IIfx vs 5 hours on your IIx, then I think for most graphic design businesses, spending that $11,000 USD (which did not even include a video card - I'm sure the nice NuBus cards from SuperMac or Radius would have been a couple thousand on their own?) makes a lot of sense.

And, if two years later, the Quadra 900 gets that Photoshop filter down to 1 hour, you probably buy that too.

Fundamentally, in most businesses, people, not equipment, costs money. If someone is spending 90% of their time staring at a busy cursor, and you can reduce that by half by spending $11K (or $15K) on a IIfx, you... probably buy the IIfx.

And that comes back to what I said to our friend earlier - in that era of Gasseeism, Apple thought they could squeeze graphics professionals for $10K machines every 2-3 years, and thought they didn't need anything new on the low end - you could just sell the 1986-era Mac Plus or the 1987-era Mac SE at its original price in 1990, or maybe just the IIgs.

Then they had the big freakout that led to the fall 1990 low-cost machines, but even then, they tried their best to limit those machines so that those professional users would keep buying their Quadra 900s and 840avs and their Power Mac 8100s. And it was too late to stop the exodus towards Windows that started with 3.0, continued with 3.1, then peaked with 95...

The main mistake they made was the same mistake that Sun, SGI and co made too - they thought they could sell high-end machines for specialized workloads for $10-20K USD, double performance every 2-3 years, and laugh all the way to the bank forever, but it turns out that if i) x86 turns out to be able to double performance every 2-3 years more reliably, ii) an x86 Windows box eventually delivers the same performance on the same workload at $4K, and iii) the x86 Windows box can run other software for tasks outside that workload (e.g. a basic office suite to collaborate with others in the company), then... oops, people will just buy the $4K x86 Windows box. They simply didn't realize that, no matter what advantages (performance, GUI, etc) your platform may have in the short term, in the long run, you cannot compete with the economies of scale of an ecosystem that sells 50-100X more machines.

What's amazing is that Apple actually survived and managed to reinvent themselves as a lifestyle brand and then slowly-but-surely grow the Mac back up - the *NIX workstation vendors had no such luck...

(Note that Apple learned their lesson with the iPhone/iPad/etc - while they priced them at a bit of a premium, they've generally tried their best to build and leverage economies of scale. And they've launched other derivative products like the Apple TV that give them more scale. And they've tried very hard to build a dominant, diversified ecosystem of third-party products rather than narrowly focusing on some markets.)
 
Yup, but... the IIfx was a professional machine for graphic designers.

If you could do a Photoshop filter in 2 hours on your IIfx vs 5 hours on your IIx, then I think for most graphic design businesses, spending that $11,000 USD (which did not even include a video card - I'm sure the nice NuBus cards from SuperMac or Radius would have been a couple thousand on their own?) makes a lot of sense.

And, if two years later, the Quadra 900 gets that Photoshop filter down to 1 hour, you probably buy that too.

Fundamentally, in most businesses, people, not equipment, costs money. If someone is spending 90% of their time staring at a busy cursor, and you can reduce that by half by spending $11K (or $15K) on a IIfx, you... probably buy the IIfx.

And that comes back to what I said to our friend earlier - in that era of Gasseeism, Apple thought they could squeeze graphics professionals for $10K machines every 2-3 years, and thought they didn't need anything new on the low end - you could just sell the 1986-era Mac Plus or the 1987-era Mac SE at its original price in 1990, or maybe just the IIgs.

Then they had the big freakout that led to the fall 1990 low-cost machines, but even then, they tried their best to limit those machines so that those professional users would keep buying their Quadra 900s and 840avs and their Power Mac 8100s. And it was too late to stop the exodus towards Windows that started with 3.0, continued with 3.1, then peaked with 95...

The main mistake they made was the same mistake that Sun, SGI and co made too - they thought they could sell high-end machines for specialized workloads for $10-20K USD, double performance every 2-3 years, and laugh all the way to the bank forever, but it turns out that if i) x86 turns out to be able to double performance every 2-3 years more reliably, ii) an x86 Windows box eventually delivers the same performance on the same workload at $4K, and iii) the x86 Windows box can run other software for tasks outside that workload (e.g. a basic office suite to collaborate with others in the company), then... oops, people will just buy the $4K x86 Windows box. They simply didn't realize that, no matter what advantages (performance, GUI, etc) your platform may have in the short term, in the long run, you cannot compete with the economies of scale of an ecosystem that sells 50-100X more machines.

What's amazing is that Apple actually survived and managed to reinvent themselves as a lifestyle brand and then slowly-but-surely grow the Mac back up - the *NIX workstation vendors had no such luck...

(Note that Apple learned their lesson with the iPhone/iPad/etc - while they priced them at a bit of a premium, they've generally tried their best to build and leverage economies of scale. And they've launched other derivative products like the Apple TV that give them more scale. And they've tried very hard to build a dominant, diversified ecosystem of third-party products rather than narrowly focusing on some markets.)
Right exactly. Can you imagine though, paying 11k for a IIfx and then the Quadra comes and is actually cheaper? And yes, that’s the point, the commodity machines at the specialized machines’ lunch. At my college, I worked the graphics labs, we had an Amiga lab, a Mac lab, and an SGI machine for animation. We had a PC lab but it got much less use than the others.

Funny to think that had commodore not been commodore, and played their cards right, they might have won those battles, imagine a IIfx- killing machine for 3k with custom chips and expandability.

In a way it’s good that machines have become all purpose, but the fact that those niche capabilities still exist means that if apple doesn’t jump for them, they become irrelevant in those fields. But as apple found out, you make a hell of a lot more money selling 1 million 1k macbook airs, with AirPods, phones, and iPads to match, than by selling 1 thousand Mac pros.
 
Right exactly. Can you imagine though, paying 11k for a IIfx and then the Quadra comes and is actually cheaper? And yes, that’s the point, the commodity machines at the specialized machines’ lunch. At my college, I worked the graphics labs, we had an Amiga lab, a Mac lab, and an SGI machine for animation. We had a PC lab but it got much less use than the others.

Funny to think that had commodore not been commodore, and played their cards right, they might have won those battles, imagine a IIfx- killing machine for 3k with custom chips and expandability.

In a way it’s good that machines have become all purpose, but the fact that those niche capabilities still exist means that if apple doesn’t jump for them, they become irrelevant in those fields. But as apple found out, you make a hell of a lot more money selling 1 million 1k macbook airs, with AirPods, phones, and iPads to match, than by selling 1 thousand Mac pros.
I don't think you'd be that upset - the Quadra came out 18 months after the IIfx, so if you bought your IIfx at launch, you would have gotten huge productivity improvements for 18 months, then I think you looked at whether the first Quadras delivered enough of a boost to upgrade. Maybe you upgraded, maybe you waited for the 950/800/840av while Adobe and whoever else optimized their code for the 68040 (I remember, too, that there was a weird compatibility thing with cache and the backwards compatibility mode lowered the 68040 performance to 68030 levels, so while the software vendors are updating their code for that, you might as well keep the still-faster IIfx in use). Maybe a few people kept their IIfxes in service until the Power Macs.

Also, in some/most graphic design firms, I think they would have moved the computers around. The person who does the heavy Photoshop work might have gotten the new Quadra, then the IIfx is assigned to someone who is mostly doing page layout, and the IIcx/IIci is handed down to someone else. Not everybody would have been doing the type of stuff, e.g. with filters in Photoshop, that required multiple hours to run on any of these machines.

Also, Apple offered logic board upgrades back then. Not sure how much a IIx --> IIfx or a IIci --> Quadra 700 would have cost, but surely a lot less than a new machine.

That being said, I'm sure they were probably at least a little grumpy. Grumpy enough that once this software became available on Windows, Apple never sold crazy-insanely-priced professional machines anymore - the high end settled in the $4000-5000USD, not the $11K of the IIfx. Then dropped again in the dark era...
 
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LOL, I remember a client who had a IIfx and used it only for word processing...
Did they buy the IIfx new?

If they got it used from a graphic design firm in 1993, it could have been a great deal :) Probably better than an LC III.

I knew someone whose teenage brothers had a IIfx in their room... in 1999. I wonder whether someone else in the household (e.g. their dad) had paid so much money for that thing 9 years earlier that he was still trying to squeeze some use out of it almost a decade later.
 
Interesting question - how, inflation-adjusted, does the Mac Studio compare price-wise to the G3/G4 Power Macs? Weren't G4 Power Macs starting at like $1699USD at one point?

There was an interesting paradigm shift at some point - iMacs went up-market and Mac Pros went way way way way upmarket. Not sure when it started - the iMac G5? Not offering a single-processor Core 2-based Mac Pro, leaving the iMac, especially when it moved away from laptop CPUs, as the mainstream Intel Mac desktop? The trash can Mac Pro? People needing productivity desktops (if there are still any left) presumably went to 27" iMacs unless they were doing Really Serious Demanding Work that justified spending 2.5X more for the Mac Pro. And Apple encouraged this to some extent - you could even get 10 gigabit Ethernet on an iMac! And as the Mac Pro became more and more upmarket, I'm sure sales volume dropped dramatically compared to, say, the Power Mac G4 Quicksilver or MDD, leading to under-investment and stupidly long product lifecycles, leading to more people buying iMacs, etc.

Maybe they are reversing this shift now...but it's worth noting, in those days, there was no "ultimate pro workstation". Which almost begs the question - if there was no need for an "ultimate pro workstation" in the days when the pro was expected to get the top-end Power Mac G4 and the normal productivity user was expected to get the lower-end Power Mac G4s, is there really a need for an "ultimate pro workstation" beyond the top-end Mac Studio now? I wonder if they might not quietly be exploring whether they can just avoid the R&D of an "M2 Extreme" or whatever and never replace the Mac Pro...
The prices started to go up on the PowerMac with the G5 and the iMac price went up a little with the iMac G4. Before the PowerMac G5 you could get the MDD PowerMac G4 for $1499 and the G5 bumped up to $1999 then Mac Pro started at $2499. The iMac went from $999 to $1299 with the G4. The $1299 entry iMac has stayed pretty consistent up until the 4K version when it went up to $1499 and then came back down to $1299 a few years later and has stayed there.
 
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Did they buy the IIfx new?

If they got it used from a graphic design firm in 1993, it could have been a great deal :) Probably better than an LC III.

I knew someone whose teenage brothers had a IIfx in their room... in 1999. I wonder whether someone else in the household (e.g. their dad) had paid so much money for that thing 9 years earlier that he was still trying to squeeze some use out of it almost a decade later.

Nope, brand new; they were the type that always had to have the latest & greatest...
 
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For Apple, the transitions are easy because they support very limited set of devices and there is very limited app ecosystem. The ecosystem is just big enough to serve the needs of college students (mainly English majors) and housewives/husbands. It's not useful for much else.
English majors and stay-at-home dads? Where are you getting this stuff? There are certainly fields with low Mac usage due to lack of software (e.g. engineering), but Macs have been famously popular among artists and creative professionals for the past 3 decades (especially video/audio/photography), and have strong representation in many other fields (e.g. publishing, web/mobile development, various fields of science).

Speaking to my own field, Macs are well-represented in neuroscience and biology because you get all the benefits of a proper UNIX-like system (e.g. a real terminal, a package manager, compatibility with niche Linux-based programs that don't play nice with Windows) without the administrative pains that come with desktop Linux, and while still being able to run a wide range of polished commercial/proprietary software (e.g. MS Office, Teams, Photoshop). At my institution, at least 50% of the machines in the Psych/Neuro and Biology departments are Macs.

Anyway, the reason Apple's been good at transitions is because they've put a ton of effort into making them as painless as possible: the relatively-seamless Classic Environment for OS9 -> OSX, Rosetta 1 for PPC -> x86, and the surprisingly fast Rosetta 2 for x86 -> ARM64. Those aren't trivial technologies, they require a lot of effort and planning to make it so 95% of end users never have to care what architecture their computer's using.
 
One small detail - the 68K to PowerPC transition happened years before Mach, OS X, NeXTSTEP, etc were at Apple. If anything, the NeXT world was ported to PowerPC away from 68k/x86 because Apple was heavily invested in PowerPC at the time of the acquisition.
It's actually more like... with the Apple acquisition, NeXT technology got ported back to PowerPC.

A not widely known bit of NeXT's history is that NeXT tried to move to PowerPC. They got most of the way there, even. They made prototype PPC hardware and had a fairly complete port of NeXTSTEP running on it. That was about when NeXT's financial troubles forced them to give up on making their own hardware at all, so it never shipped to the public.

This became part of NeXT's pitch to Apple. They'd already done a PPC port, they'd just have to dust it off and bring it up on Apple's PowerPC motherboards. I remember engineers leaking a screenshot of first boot on PowerMac hardware only a month or two after the acquisition closed.

That's when they ran into the cold hard reality that Mac application authors were not eager to port to a completely alien API (the one we now know as Cocoa). The feedback Apple got was along the lines of "if you expect us to rewrite for a new API, we will. But it will be the Win32 API, because that's where the money is." So even though Apple could have shipped a complete NeXT-derived OS very quickly, they ended up needing four years to ship MacOS X 10.0. They had to develop both a backwards compatibility solution (running "Classic" apps in a VM) and a forwards compatibility API solution (Carbon).

Interesting question - how, inflation-adjusted, does the Mac Studio compare price-wise to the G3/G4 Power Macs? Weren't G4 Power Macs starting at like $1699USD at one point?

There was an interesting paradigm shift at some point - iMacs went up-market and Mac Pros went way way way way upmarket. Not sure when it started - the iMac G5? Not offering a single-processor Core 2-based Mac Pro, leaving the iMac, especially when it moved away from laptop CPUs, as the mainstream Intel Mac desktop? The trash can Mac Pro?
The first- and second-gen Intel Mac Pros (2006/2008) were quite reasonably priced. They shipped during the time when Intel was attaining monopoly status in the workstation and server CPU markets. Once entrenched as a monopoly, Intel raised Xeon prices quite a lot, and Mac Pro prices followed along.

The other factor here is that the market for expandable tower desktop computers shrank a lot (in relative terms) during the early oughts. More and more people were buying their first home computers to get on the Internet, and laptops were a popular way to go because they fit unobtrusively in any home. This was also when laptops became so much more powerful and capable that lots of tower users could switch.

Apple chose to lean heavily into that trend, and eliminated the entry level expandable desktop from its lineup.
 
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That's when they ran into the cold hard reality that Mac application authors were not eager to port to a completely alien API (the one we now know as Cocoa). The feedback Apple got was along the lines of "if you expect us to rewrite for a new API, we will. But it will be the Win32 API, because that's where the money is." So even though Apple could have shipped a complete NeXT-derived OS very quickly, they ended up needing four years to ship MacOS X 10.0. They had to develop both a backwards compatibility solution (running "Classic" apps in a VM) and a forwards compatibility API solution (Carbon).
I sometimes wonder what the mobile landscape might look like if Windows Phone (and webOS) had attempted a similar maneuver (i.e introduced a Carbon-like API for quickly porting Windows Mobile/PalmOS apps alongside the full modernized APIs they launched with). There was a ton of existing software for their preceding OSes and Microsoft/Palm just tossed it to the wind, forcing users and devs to both start again from scratch.
 
English majors and stay-at-home dads? Where are you getting this stuff? There are certainly fields with low Mac usage due to lack of software (e.g. engineering), but Macs have been famously popular among artists and creative professionals for the past 3 decades (especially video/audio/photography), and have strong representation in many other fields (e.g. publishing, web/mobile development, various fields of science).

Speaking to my own field, Macs are well-represented in neuroscience and biology because you get all the benefits of a proper UNIX-like system (e.g. a real terminal, a package manager, compatibility with niche Linux-based programs that don't play nice with Windows) without the administrative pains that come with desktop Linux, and while still being able to run a wide range of polished commercial/proprietary software (e.g. MS Office, Teams, Photoshop). At my institution, at least 50% of the machines in the Psych/Neuro and Biology departments are Macs.

Anyway, the reason Apple's been good at transitions is because they've put a ton of effort into making them as painless as possible: the relatively-seamless Classic Environment for OS9 -> OSX, Rosetta 1 for PPC -> x86, and the surprisingly fast Rosetta 2 for x86 -> ARM64. Those aren't trivial technologies, they require a lot of effort and planning to make it so 95% of end users never have to care what architecture their computer's using.
Yeah, the artists... I am aware but that a niche category as is neuroscience. There are very few apps in all these areas combined. Apple preparation for transitions is nothing special. The main efforts is with app developers. It's manageable when app/driver ecosystem is as limited as macOS ecosystem. The ecosystem for Windows is orders of magnitude bigger.
 
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