This sucks. This page makes it clear this is the motivation for "Ads on Maps", as they talk about it prominently here - they are now directly selling the attention of their device consumers to their business customers.
I guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.
I think what they've announced is the best fit for small businesses, not large enterprises. They can still treat it as a B2C-style service - many tiny customers with similar needs. Mom and Pop can now get a domain name through Apple, with email accounts - for a lot of people that might be the only way they'd know how to do something like that.
The business needs here aren't so different to family manangement features, say.
Throwing in Entra ID / Google Workspace authentication and multiple Apple IDs per device is probably the most "interesting" part as to where that ends up in the distant future.
Apple's entire success story is their vertical integration. They can't do that and OEM.
As for the PC makers: they don't innovate. Microsoft doesn't care who sells PCs, Intel doesn't care who sells PCs. Every PC maker is essentially an assembly company. If you appreciate Apple's innovation in the laptop space over the past x years, then you don't want Apple to be an OEM.
Who has successfully managed this kind of transition? The obvious case is IBM which is now essentially a consulting company and doesn’t sell PCs anymore.
its the only path to go to be able to continue to support their pricing models - they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.
> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch
I'd argue that (the low end of) Apple products are the cheapest they've ever been - the $599 iPhone 17e is below the inflation-adjusted price of the original iPhone, and at $599 the MacBook Neo is the cheapest launch price an Apple laptop has ever listed at (not even adjusting for inflation!)
The maximum amount you can spend at the high-end has certainly gone up over time, although the basic MacBook Pro Max config costs roughly the same as it's peer from 10-15 years ago - nobody's forcing folks to shell out for the 128GB of RAM (something that didn't exist on laptops at all till very recently)
None of that refutes anything that was said. macOS is a third-class citizen measured by market share, and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.
Consumers do not want the Mac. Datacenters don't want Apple Silicon. People want the iPhone, they want Airpods, but the M-series Macs have spent 5 years changing absolutely nothing.
> and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.
So the company that makes between 50-60% of all profits in personal computers has created a market where it makes 100% of the profits, but albeit smaller than the whole PC market. That's terrrrible, what was Apple thinking!
Market share is far from everything when people live in poverty and do not have money to spend on good hardware and software. Apple makes stuff for affluent people, and then makes a ton of money from those rich folks. Making Apple the most valuable company in the history of humanity. Boy, that's a terrible place to be in!
I shouldn't have to repeat myself; this still doesn't refute the claim that Apple has ceded the consumer compute market. Cheap Macs have flooded the used market for years, and people still gravitate towards plastic Wintel boxes and Chromebooks.
> Apple makes stuff for affluent people
is just repeating the original claim upthread:
>> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.
The fact Apple maximizes for profits, and does not care about market share, does not mean it has ceded the market at all. It’s the exact contrary. Apple’s making money akin to the #2 position while being #4 and that’s an issue for you?
Once again you retreat to anecdata; how can you prove that used Mac laptops are not popular?
