The emphasis in the lead on the Post PC era is telling. This confirms to me macOS platform innovation (software and hardware) is on the back burner. Jobs-Apple was not sentimental about abruptly dropping product lines, and entirely exiting markets very swiftly after a long senescence, one which high-end macOS hardware is in the midst of right now. Most recent example is the high-end display market with the Thunderbolt Display. The Apple DOS platform and MacOS (the cooperative multitasking one, not the NeXTStep-based one) more salient examples to the "whither macOS" discussion.

Cook-Apple, without a strong design lead possessing a keen technical sense, might drag out the macOS senescence, making for a miserable macOS professional customer base. While a very tiny fraction of the market, they're very vocal, and can be distracting if Apple is indeed attempting to disentangle itself from the PC era as Jobs called it. Another area of concern is the strategy note explicitly set out looking for lock-in at the design stage outset, rather than opportunistically and organically monetizing lock-in where and when it happens as a side-effect of delivering a delightful customer experience. Down that path of making lock-in an explicit design goal lies mediocre design output.

I wonder Apple is mulling over whether or not to exit the high-end PC market, because the executive team senses future profitability lays in the consumer segment, commoditizing the most common pieces of the PC market into the portable devices they make tomorrow. There still exists a high-end camera market for example, but Apple makes far more money than those camera companies with just a consumer-good-enough camera feature on their smartphones. The question they might be exploring right now is if they can expand the iPad Pro far enough to convert+capture the bulk of the macOS market into consumer segments, then ditch the rest (including the high-end macOS/PC market).

I'm not looking forward to a future transition to a Linux-with-Windows-emulation stack for my daily driver laptop, because there are a LOT of bits of polish in laptops that Linux (and Windows for that matter) still has not nailed yet that are greatly aggravating in my daily experience. Ultra-reliable sleep and wake (especially interaction with networking) tops my list, but other UI and user experience bits, gone over exhaustively in other HN discussion threads about the latest MacBook Pros. There are a lot of sharp corners in the laptop experience that macOS rounded off over the past decades, and while I would miss them, if fundamental support for a laptop form factor personal computing platform is disappearing from Apple then move I must.

This is ironic, because if fucking over Google was a key Apple strategic goal (for the record, I think that's not how a business should be aimed/run, and I see promising signs Cook is willing to truly bury the hatchet), then I thought that an Apple Home Server running macOS with services that many people tend to get from Google, decentralizing Google's key services like GMail (including calendar, contacts, etc.), Voice, etc., and portal'ing a voice-based interface to capture and refine/curate search requests (and direct them to a service like DDG instead of Google), with ultra-seamless iDevice and macOS integration and enhancement to attract customers, would have been Apple's logical direction to slice away at Google's ad revenue.