[wjnc]

With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. They are sitting on a golden cash flow and not willing to revolutionize computing again (as the iPhone did).

Just as a N=1, I would rather pay a recurring fee in the Disney-Netflix range to Apple to get more liberty in usage from my machines. But I think they don’t dare to go those routes, because they need the broad market base and cannot extract the current cash flow from a smaller base, while setting expectations that the Googles, Samsungs can copy.

Industry leaders dilemma. Apple currently settles on market differentiation via physical products.

[Topfi]

Historically, cannibalizing has always been the right choice when it comes to such things. That was a major point of the first iPhone, that it was a full replacement for your iPod, which was instrumental in its success. All this thinking does is cloud ones judgement and let competitors succeed.

Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted.

[wjnc]

We agree.

Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift?

The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple.

[nerdsniper]

That said, the iPhone was more expensive than the iPod, and replaced 1 Apple device (plus a device made by someone else like Nokia) with 1 alternative Apple device. This had an expected increase in revenue per customer.

Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer.

[JustExAWS]

Ben Thompson of Stratechery talks about this all the time. It didn’t take courage to canibalize a $200 ASP iPod for an $800 iPhone.

[imiric]

But Mac sales pale in comparison to iPhone, and are similar to iPad numbers. So whatever revenue they would lose by not selling Macs with macOS, they could easily make up from additional sales of iPhones and iPads with macOS.

Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point.

[stavros]

Why would they spend a bunch of money to trade sales of one of their products for another?

[mschuster91]

> With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro.

Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook.

[close04]

The MacBook Air is a legit MacBook and not that much heftier than the iPad. With how powerful and efficient M chips are, they could work out just fine for a lot of people despite the more constrained thermals.

They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete.

[mschuster91]

> They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't.

Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.

The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.

[close04]

> On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that

But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.

Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.

[Topfi]

> Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.

The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Much as I’d like to see Xcode on iPad, I doubt it will happen; at least, not with the current Xcode.

Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades.

Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad.

[nicoburns]

You can configure an iPad up to 2TB. I don't think storage if going to be the blocker

[mschuster91]

Most of its size, I think, comes from the device emulator images.

[WorldPeas]

On the contrary, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to part with macbooks if they could retain their developers. But then you could probably kiss your binary freedom goodbye.