My point about iPod sales was that Mac was fairly stagnant before and after in gross revenue. Once iPods were made compatible with windows, you see Mac sales start to grow again. The strategic story was that iPod was your gateway drug into the Apple ecosystem - whether they knew it would be that way I don’t know. I suspect it took them by surprise and they weren’t sure at first if Windows support was needed or growth would continue on its own.

As for iPod saturation, I don’t know if that’s actually true and I’m too lazy to look up the numbers as to when it happened. I’ll point out two things area important when thinking about things - you have market share and market size. You don’t have saturation until you have stopped growing. Owning a constant 70% of a market that’s growing consistently each year is not saturation - was the portable music market stagnant by 2007? Maybe. But you can’t tell that just from market share. According to ChatGPT growth started slowing down in 2008 but that’s already post Razr and iPhone when it became an obvious calculus of do I want and old tech iPod or a general purpose computer and cell phone in my pocket. Nanos and shuffles kept selling well because the cell phones didn’t have an appropriate answer for a very very long time (too much growth elsewhere to bother with that use case).

The transition to Intel was in 2006. I’m skeptical that’s a motivating reason for a lot of switchers and the numbers show more growth correlation with iPod windows support and iPhone which makes sense for the attachment theory whereas I don’t see in the numbers that making a big dent. It’s important to remember that consumers don’t make decisions on what CPU is in a machine; even technical people wouldn’t make that decision since even in the tech community today it’s framed as windows vs Linux vs Mac and not Intel vs AMD unless you are building a PC from parts (and Apple isn’t in that segment).

I’m not sure why you say iPod has peaked at the time of Windows transition which was in 2004. 2007 which is when growth had started slowing is when the iPhone kept up the growth. I agree that phones being the future was going to be obvious and the Razr was likely their first dip of a toe to estimate how big the market for an iPhone would be since they had a deal with Motorola for iTunes support.

As for Apple’s computer market share, the reason it’s so high is that the overall market is stagnant but Apple is managing to eke out growth here and there. Same as with smartphones where Apple has 30% of market share but 98% of the profit; they are much more streamlined than their competitors. Expect to see their market share grow one cell phones stagnate although the story there is more complicated since they play in a wider range of economic households whereas Mac products are (as they’ve always been) in more higher end segments (since the lower end would be dominated by chromebooks or no laptop). I see no indication of Mac growth stopping pre or post iPhone - it only started more recently which makes sense it would take so long because Apple is not immune to the reality in that space even though they’ve defied it for so long (and as for many companies COVID spiked sales since kids needed to do school remotely so the recent stagnation could just have been a temporary anomaly and reversion to pre pandemic numbers).

It’s genuinely hard to say what would have happened if Apple had not released the iPhone. Certainly Apple had stabilized as a company by 2001. But Mac sales had stagnated in the years prior to iPod and without iPhone as another engine it’s unclear what would have happened to Mac sales after that especially as the overall laptop and computer segments started collapsing (but this happened much much later after the smartphone revolution). Their music business may have helped a bit but a huge part of growth there itself was due to iPhone as well. These are reinforcing effects that are really hard to tease out. It’s likely it would have kept going since it was financially more stable but it would likely be at least a 10x smaller company.

Thank you for engaging factually and thoughtfully with the analysis.