Playing devil's advocate's devil's advocate: Maybe Apple is trying to cater to advanced users again?

In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop their designs and priorities between content creators and content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s, with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was just a small niche.

Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits, thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs from workstations to, I don't know what, designer furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design cooling.

Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and they are again free to pursue the content creator market and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon), now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals Apple is starting to take the workstation market more seriously again.

The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For the remaining power users, what are their options? Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again, finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro" workflows and tooling, and these early signs are encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the Macbook Air.

If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows, there's no reason they can't provide similar support for other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1, Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it, Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring again. Hopefully. Maybe.

Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1 in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll see if it lasts...