One advantage I see of getting OSX in everyone's hands is that it lowers the barrier to develop iPhone apps. So there could be more people willing to feed the beast that is the iPhone. I hope the bean counters at Apple are able to spin this positively and actually liberate OSX..
There'd still be another big barrier, the stupid level of complication to develop for iOS. The libs are impressive, but every little thing with Swift/ObjC + UIKit takes forever to deal with, especially if you're a newbie. It's so bad that lots of devs, including big-time ones like Discord, said "screw it" and put everything inside a Javascript interpreter running on iOS (React Native).
- No widely used package management, so we have to rely on CocoaPods
- So many arbitrary different ways to do things: wut is a UIViewController vs a UIView? viewDid/WillAppear vs viewDid/WillLoad vs init, error handling (exceptions, if let, unwrapping, NSError, returning nil)
- They're anal about lots of stuff: structs vs objects, anything to do with strings, NSURL
- Swift initializers are by far the most complicated initializers I've ever seen
- Swift/Xcode are still kinda broken: tuples, debugger, initializer inheritance
- They hate new stuff: JSON is a massive pain to handle, strings are UTF16 (would should have never existed)
- The whole setup for GUI layout is awful: autolayout and any alternatives suck
- CoreData was kinda cool when it came out but is just a mess now, and idk why multithreaded usage is so hard
- Xcode is generally annoying to deal with for many reasons
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They'd probably make more money selling their OS to everyone else vs. selling computers to a small niche of users.
This probably isn't true. Microsoft makes by far the most popular desktop OS, and their profits from it are still less than 1/4 of Apple's Mac profits.
Software doesn't make much money, and being able to control both the software and the hardware allows for better user experience. Apple has thought hard about this. Same reasons Nintendo still makes consoles and develops basically exclusively for them.
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$800 for the latest and greatest 2TB NVMe from Samsung...
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/vMMwrH/samsung-970-evo-20tb-m2-2280-solid-state-drive-mz-v7e2t0bw
...I pulled a Samsung NVMe out of my 2015 MacBook Pro, so Apple does use Samsung sticks for their MBP lineup. Apple is charging $1,200 without less cost of pulling the 512GB storage chip out of the base price unit. So technically, they're charging you $1,450 for 2TB stick upgrade instead of $800.
It's a bad deal now but wasn't when the laptop came out. Apple always does this. Maybe they want to lure people in or encourage full computer upgrades or just don't want to keep changing prices.