[valuearb]

Apple's Mac business is the most profitable PC business in the world, they make more profits from Macs than the rest of the PC makers in the world. They are 7% worldwide by units, about 17% by revenues (ASP around $1200 vs. industry $500) and margins of 15% vs. industry 2-3%.

It's a $25B business that's steadily taken significant market share from Windows/Linux over the last decade.

They should give this up, why?

[Recurecur]

No one said they should "give this up". If Apple's hardware is good enough to outshine whatever competition, it will continue to sell. Plus, they could easily restrict who they license the OS to - perhaps only to a few high quality OEMs and end users who'd just build a Hackintosh instead anyhow.

I'm certainly not advocating giving macOS away or selling it cheaply either. It's worth pointing out that every 2,000,000 units of $500 macOS would be $1 billion as well - which could quickly come close to the margin on that $25B.