Apple is not in the business of selling productivity software. Even their desktops/MacOS segment is an insignificant historical afterthought by now.
To a first approximation, Apple is a manufacturer of locked-down handheld entertainment appliances whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents. There's no reason to suspect their vision for the AVP to diverge significantly from this user story.
I'm sure you felt very clever writing that zinger about children and parents, but unless the majority of Apple devices are sold to/for children -- which I would bet is extremely not true -- it's obviously wrong.
In app purchases from (crappy) games is top revenue source in App Store. Anecdotally, I’d be shocked if the majority of that wasn’t from kids using their parents’ phones.
You have deftly avoided attempting to refute the actual argument here, which is that >90% of Apple's revenue comes from their walled garden, and they have no desire to pivot back towards catering to the small and dwindling niche of power users.
Well, excuse me for refuting something you actually wrote rather than the thing you would have preferred me to focus on.
When you say something like "whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents", it's rhetorically effective. It paints a vivid picture. It encourages your readers to have a certain attitude towards the company you're talking about.
In other words, that bit of what you wrote was load-bearing. It served a purpose for you. That means that it isn't exempt from criticism. We should reject conversational norms according to which it's OK to throw in these little barbs but not OK to object when someone points out that what you're saying is flatly false.
"My goat-fucking opponent wants to raise your taxes and use the revenue to subsidize tobacco companies. You should vote against him." "Excuse me, I am absolutely not a goat-fucker. How dare you?" "Look how he avoids the central argument about his policies!"
As to the "actual argument": no, actually, that clearly isn't your actual argument, or at least if it is then your argument is unsound.
You can't get from "Macs are <10% of Apple's revenue"[1] to any prediction about what Apple will do with the Vision Pro. For that, you need to (1) classify it as "like an iPhone or iPad" rather than "like a Mac" -- which I agree is a reasonable classification, though you haven't bothered to argue for it at all and it is at least a bit debatable -- and then (2) look at what sort of thing Apple does with its iPhones and iPads. This bit you have done, kinda ... and this bit is exactly the bit where you said something obviously false. "whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents", remember? That is, or claims to be, a description of what sort of thing Apple want their devices to do. It's exactly the sort of thing that's directly relevant to supporting what you say about what features we should expect them to give the Vision Pro and its software. And, once again, it's plainly false.
[1] Perfectly true, though "an insignificant historical afterthought" is obviously false -- once again, you're festooning what you say is your "actual argument" with little untruths that make the "actual argument" feel stronger, and I wish you wouldn't -- and, also "historical afterthought" is kinda nonsensical, no? Being a historical relic and being an afterthought are opposite and incompatible varieties of insignificance.
There absolutely is an argument to be made along the lines that the VP is kinda like an iPad, and despite their impressive hardware capabilities iPads are designed for entertainment much more than for getting useful work done, and so we should also expect the VP's software to pass up opportunities to make the device useful for serious purposes in favour of making it an entertainment-consumption device. You could totally have done that. It would have been pretty similar to what you wrote. It would have been rather a persuasive argument. But it amused you to go way the hell over the top and say that Apple's non-Mac devices are mostly intended to manipulate children into wasting their parents' money and, once again, that's obviously not true and you put it right where the core of your "actual argument" should have been.
I'm aware that I'm making rather a big deal of a small lie. But this sort of thing is everywhere in online discourse at the moment, and I am getting extremely fed up of it. It's never enough to make a reasonable argument; it's always necessary to throw in all these playing-to-the-gallery jabs, which no doubt get you a bunch of likes and retweets and other forms of Meaningless Internet Points. It's yet another form of the optimizing-for-engagement that is eating our societies alive, and the HN crowd is supposed to be smarter than that, and I wish we would all collectively Do Better, damn it.
There's plenty of hardware that is as capable as a MacBook pro or more capable, depending on the application. If you're a software dev, the MacBook pro is pretty anemic compared to what AMD and Intel can offer desktop side.
> Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows
This is both true and completely irrelevant, because the point of the above comment is that Apple is not in the business of catering to this use case.
Look at the annual revenues: $225 billion from iPhone/iPad, $100 billion from "services" (which Apple mostly characterizes as "app store stuff"), $40 billion from accessories (watch, airpods, etc), $30 billion from desktops. The Mac segment comes out to 7.9% of their overall revenue. And this number is shrinking in both the absolute and relative sense, as "services" continues to grow and as Mac units shipped peaked in 2022.
This is by design of course. The only major platform that requires a specific minor platform from the same vendor to target, at least that I know of. Apple knows how to make money.
> You can't build iPhone or iPad apps on iPhones or iPads yet, so a decent chunk of that revenue currently relies on the Mac as well.
This is both entirely true and still manages to miss the point. Yes, Apple keeps the Mac around exclusively to accommodate the creation of iOS apps. No, they are not financially incentivized to create new categories of hardware that cater toward productivity when instead they could lock them down and milk that cow for all it's worth via the app store tax.
That word right there means that we can both be correct, because I personally find MacOS to be frustrating for Dev compared to every other alternative. Great for creativity, but not so much for productivity.
I've used Macbooks for dev pretty much my whole career and I do think that they're some of the _best_ laptops available for dev.
But the caveat to my statement is that _everything_ added to their ecosystem to business reasons is useless and counterproductive. For example I can plug my Android phone into a Windows machine (two different companies inb4 someone uses flawed logic) and it just works. If I plug my Android phone into my Macbook it doesn't work at all...but an iPhone does! ;)
They only very recently got decent-ish Window management, basic snapping that Linux/Windows has had for at least a decade or longer. And even then their implementation is "pretty" but slow to respond. It's like just expand and snap the fucking window for fuck's sake.
In terms of the "development environment" they enjoy having had the OS built on top of FreeBSD (which yes, they have contributed to - bet Apple management hated that).
To me it's a machine that gets stuff done; they could literally strip the thing down to the bare minimum, removing all of the "magical wonderful Apple stuff with cutesy fancy sounding names" and I couldn't give a shit.
Well that's because Windows is very, very bad software. Nobody actually likes it, they use it because they need to for some bespoke barely functional application. It's Stockholm syndrome.
And also virtually every film editor, colourist and videographer. Oh and also every illustrator and graphic designer. And a host of other professions where having a clean UI, colour accuracy, on a reliable machine that rarely if ever crashes is essential rather than a preference.
As a film maker and editor I'm enormously more productive on my dual screen (used) M1 Max Studio machine than I was on a variety of PC setups with high end GPUs. Even just the missing overhead of not having to keep graphic drives and constant Windows updates is great. Reliable renders were never a thing on Windows. The time lost doing things again because window had some strange colour issue, render crash, font issue and on and on was ludicrous.
The idea of having to use Windows for daily productivity sends a shiver down my spine.
I don't agree with the OP, but you gotta admit.. it used to feel like Apple was more dedicated to this market when they could keep interesting Pro desktop kit evolving on an acceptable pace.
I don't know... I agree that they're no longer innovative in terms of UI and original categories of devices. But the M1 chips have been enormously innovative in terms of performance per watt. One reason essentially every 'creative' (bar 3d designers) uses Macs is that unplugged they run as fast as plugged in. There's literally no PC laptop you can build or buy with integrated graphics powerful enough to compete - while on the move and away from power. Perhaps the new AMD Strix Halo devices will change this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Their Pro desktop/laptop hardware is the best it's ever been as long as it fits your use case (ie not adding a bunch of PCI-E cards or third party GPUs).
Every company I've worked at in the last 15-20 years has run fully on Mac. First it was the designers, then the devs, and now everyone. I used Windows for years and have some experience with various Linux distros, but if I joined a company that made me use either of those full-time I'd immediately start looking for another job.
To a first approximation, Apple is a manufacturer of locked-down handheld entertainment appliances whose primary function is to psychologically condition children into siphoning off money from their inattentive parents. There's no reason to suspect their vision for the AVP to diverge significantly from this user story.