I said MacOS variants - iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Those are three areas where we have recent real numbers from Apple before they stopped reporting volume numbers.
I could include Watches and AppleTVs but those are far from generally purpose computing devices.
MacOS is a desktop operating system, the other devices you mentioned don't run desktop operating systems. You have to do an Apples to Apples comparison, because otherwise linux wipes the floor with every OS if all we are talking about is market share on metal.
Why do you have to compare desktop operating systems? An iPad Pro running the latest OS is faster than most x86 PCs, run Office and now Photoshop and can easily take the place of a desktop computer for many people.
But regardless, if you are referring to “successful”. Which I’m discussing, success from a business standpoint is profitable. Apple is definitely making more in profit and revenue than Microsoft. As in, Apple had the more successful strategy.
There are plenty of people whose only computing device is a phone and others who are hardly ever use a computer for personal use. Even the iPhone can keep up performance wise with some low end PCs being sold.
Well, if I wanted to say that, that’s what I would have said....
But I said variants. But, if you take MacOS out, the statement remains.
And seeing that iOS is now running Microsoft Office a version of Photoshop and is using more powerful processors than most x86 based PCs, we can complete take out MacOS and just iOS.
I said nothing about popularity, I was saying successful. Success in a business isn’t marketshare or popularity its profitability. Seeing how little profit that OEMs are making selling either Android devices (most of whom are losing money - except for Samsung) or PCs, I wouldn’t be surprised that Apple is more successful than all of the PC makers combined selling Macs and its well known that Apple captures more than 70% of the profit in mobile.
People don't use their phones to write documents or do professional image/video editing or any professional workload, really. And I think market share is as good a metric as any when it comes to defining "success". Profitability is due to many reasons and it's not always due creating the best product.
Can you spend “marketshare”? Can you sustain a business on “marketshare”?
A company can’t stay viable based on “marketshars”. Next am I arguing what’s “best”. Do you think Dell would rather be in Apple’s position with “market share” or Apple’s in Dell’s?
There are plenty of people whose only personal computing device is their phone either by choice or necessity. Heck I am a developer and the only thing I use my computer at home for is as a Plex server.
It’s on my list to get a powerful enough NAS to transcode movies and I won’t even use it for that. I’ll run Plex and bit torrent (to uhh download Linux ISO’s) and B2 backed cloud backup app directly on it.
My wife gave her computer to our son because she uses her iPad for everything including Office.
Now that Apple (finally) supports a mouse, I connect my same Bluetooth keyboard+mouse to my iPad that I use for my work computer when I bring it home.
As an outsider, it is very difficult for me to understand Apple's story on whether these devices are, or are not, on the same OS; what its/their "root" was; and what's the future direction (separate OS, or convergence, and if latter which one will form the core and which one will transform). The newest "iPad OS" or whatever it is called does not help matters - again, as an outsider, I cannot tell if this is a marketing differentiation or a true one.
All that being said, I rather thought that iPhones & iPads run "iOS", and Macs run "OSX", and that they were different.
First there were two operating systems Classic MacOS and Next.
Apple acquired Next and they combined some parts of classic MacOS and NextStep to create OS X.
Apple then stripped OS X down, got rid of some Mac specific parts, added some new frameworks to create “iPhone OS” and introduced the iPhone Initially they claimed that the iPhone was “.running OS X”.
They introduced the iPod Touch later the same year and the iPad 3 years later at this point, they renamed “iPhone OS” to “iOS”.
They introduced watchOS and tvOS as more variants of iOS. There is also some iOS variant running on HomePods.
Over the years the two operating systems have both somewhat diverged and they still share both some old code and new code between the two.
This year, they renamed the version of iOS running on the iPad “iPadOS” as they started adding more iPad specific features.
They also introduced the “Catalyst” framework to bring iOS specific frameworks to the Mac to make porting from iPad to the Mac easier.
Finally, they introduced Swift UI as a common cross platform framework for watchOS, iOS, macOS, iPadOS and tvOS.
They all run the same kernel and runtimes, but some diversified distributions have extra runtimes and frameworks for their task-specific implementations.
- Cocoa
- Objective-C
- XNU
It used to be all based on pure Darwin (also from Apple, but OSS). But since the iOS releases it has been diversified too much and Apple no longer wanted to backport to their own OSS (but they still backport to all GPLv2 and lower).
What does “variant” mean? It’s not some obscure word that no one understands. Would it have been more clear if I said Darwin variants? Who the heck knows what Darwin is besides a few nerds?
I didn’t say that MS isn’t good at maintaining backwards compatibility. My mom in fact uses my old Mac Mini 1.66Ghz Core Duo introduced in 2006 running Windows 7 and I just retired a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop introduced in 2009 from running my Plex Server running Windows 10.
I’m saying that it hasn’t been a sound business strategy as the rest of the tech industry has moved on. Windows (not Microsoft) has failed in the cloud, the web browser market, and mobile.
> Windows (not Microsoft) has failed in the cloud, the web browser market, and mobile.
I don't agree on the Cloud, it's the strongest competitor to Amazon, and on the other businesses there is no competition: mobile and browser is Google.
That’s what I meant. Microsoft hasn’t failed in the cloud - Windows has.
As far as mobile being “google”. In terms of revenue, it came out in the Oracle lawsuit that Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence. Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones. Google also reportedly still pays Apple $8 billion a year to bectge default search engine in Apple devices.
> Microsoft hasn’t failed in the cloud - Windows has.
as a server, maybe.
as a client not really.
> Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence
Yeah, they are good at hiding profits
and they are an ADV company which dominated the mobile market because it was strategic, they don't need to profit from selling (and manufacturing) the HW, they just need your screen time.
There are between 2.5 and 3 billion android devices around the world.
And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.
> Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones.
That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.
In 2018 thy made $33.36 billions, down of 9.2% from the previous year.
If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.
But people would still watch YouTube advs on iPhone replacements.
Yeah, they are good at hiding profits
and they are an ADV company which dominated the mobile market because it was strategic, they don't need to profit from selling (and manufacturing) the HW, they just need your screen time
You think Google lied under discovery? Oracle wasn’t just counting their meager hardware sells but they were also counting as sales, Google Play revenue etc.
And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.
There is a country that has over 1 billion people running Android with no Google Services.
That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.
And it’s still about the same as MS’s revenue last quarter at 38 billion
If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.
Apple is far more diversified than Google. Almost all of Google’s profits come from advertising, 48% of Apple’s revenue come from the iPhones.
The Mac business by itself is about the size of McDonald’s the last time I checked.
Estimates for Youtube is that it’s barely profitable if at all.
Where did you find those numbers?
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4...
In Q4 of 2018, Apple sold 4.9 million Macs. Lenovo alone sold 16.6 million PC's. All brands except apple sold 63.7 million.