The Mac is a victim of the iPhone's success - pure and simple.
From a short & medium term perspective the business/ops guys will tell you that any engineering resources spent on Mac would yield better results in iPhone land.
It requires fundamental "long-game" mindset to realise that once you lose the high-end Mac guys - you lose your best proponents - then you go into a decline, a long and very profitable decline.
There is no excuse for the current line-up of Macs - super expensive, incremental and confusing half-baked features.
> The Mac is a victim of the iPhone's success - pure and simple. From a short & medium term perspective the business/ops guys will tell you that any engineering resources spent on Mac would yield better results in iPhone land.
Which is why I'm voicing my objections to the way that Apple is treating their Mac lineup by leaving iOS. I sold my iPhone and iPads (I had 2) and moved to Android.
I'm still a Mac user who will happily spend thousands when they offer compelling reasons to upgrade. But if their belief is that there is more money in iOS, I'm making damn sure that I'm not part of that equation.
Switching to Android also has the pleasant side effect of being far cheaper. I was able to get a brand new Nexus 5X for net-$20 after trading in my old iPhone 6, which barely held a charge anymore. And Google Fi is so much cheaper for my use case (I use about a half gig per month and do a lot of travel in other countries) that I'm saving around $20/mo and getting better service.
For those of you wanting Apple to focus more product development resources on macOS and Macs, abandoning that platform will only confirm Apple's decision to focus on iOS. We need to abandon that platform if we want more focus on macOS.
For instance, if you are developing a game with Sprite Kit, you will find that around 95% of the code is IDENTICAL on Mac and iOS. Sprite Kit itself works the same on both. Sister frameworks like AVFoundation are mostly the same and they have peanut-buttered some #define values to allow “different” classes like UIColor and NSColor to be SKColor, etc. to make it easier to have code that does not needlessly vary. You end up having to clearly think about UI differences between the two but that is true anyway between desktop and mobile.
On the other hand, sure, a utility-style application is not that similar between iOS and macOS once you get past the likes of NSString and NSArray. Yet, utility applications often look and work quite differently between desktop and mobile so this may make sense. And if you rely on the cloud to implement part of the functionality (and share it between the two), you may find that again you are dealing with mainly a lot of UI-centered differences on the two platforms that would have been different anyway.
The iPad is the weird one. Here, Apple probably needs a middle API that really can use exactly the same constructs between mobile and desktop where they actually do end up looking or even working the same.
It requires fundamental "long-game" mindset to realise that once you lose the high-end Mac guys - you lose your best proponents - then you go into a decline, a long and very profitable decline.
There is no excuse for the current line-up of Macs - super expensive, incremental and confusing half-baked features.