[mattnewton]

I think two things are happening. The first is, Apple does not pay attention to it's marketshare, instead thinking of itself as a mercedes with 10% market share on the high end. Apple wants to avoid commoditization at all costs. Two, I think that Apple believes strongly in protecting it's margins. Despite the current cash piles, Apple execs still vividly remember a time when Steve jobs resurrected the company from near death[0], and religiously follows what worked for them before. One lesson was to always prefer to pouring money into R&D over decreasing pricing.

[0] I mean, this wired cover was cited often during my time there as a perfect illustration of the mood then https://cdn2.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3520866/Wired-p...

[IBM]

Apple was pretty clearly shaped by their near death experience and it showed on the balance sheet. It took them a very long time for them to start returning cash to shareholders, but Tim Cook finally did it and that was the right capital allocation decision. They've returned $186 billion via buybacks and dividends since then and cash (and equivalents) has grown in spite of it.

They would rather stay relatively small (115k employees but over half of that is probably retail) and operate like a start-up than grow headcount to support more products. Frankly that's the right decision. There's been a lot of whining from Mac fans about being neglected and today people have been sharing this Vox piece [1] saying they should change to support more products, which would be fine if it wasn't the fact that being resource constrained is part of Apple's organizational culture and if it wouldn't kill the magic that led to their position in the first place.

[1] http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/27/13706776/apple-funct...

[yuhong]

I was wondering for a while what if Intel bought say Compaq back in 1991 instead of Rod Canion and Jim Harris leaving.