For all of those accolades, the Mac is still a minority player in every computer market. They're especially a non-entity in on-prem enterprise buildouts and datacenter construction, which is where the money is going right now.

It's nice to have these types of niches when they make you money. But the Mac isn't profitable like the iPhone is, and probably makes less money than the iPad does if you count aftermarket service sales. The further Apple drifts from their roots as a computer manufacturer, the more the Mac starts to look like a liability to them.

Apple's Last Stand is their prosumer segment, and once that's gone I don't think their vertical integration playbook gets them anywhere further. Their bottom line is dependent on finding new ways to make B2C profitable, which has resulted in subscription services like AppleTV/Apple Music/iCloud so far.

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DrScientist 18 hours ago | parent [-]

It has about 10% of the global laptop market - and that's growing - making it the 4th largest single vendor, and it has about 35-40% of the global tablet market.

That looks pretty healthy to me.

Note that because most enterprise software is now web based ( ie moved to the data centre as you have pointed out ) - a lot of the corporate Windows only lockin has gone - so I'm seeing a steady rise in Macs in business.

What's not healthy is the desktop market ( apple laptops outsell desktops like 10:1 ) - but that's whiles that's more marked in the Apple space, it's largely an overall market trend. ( Overall desktops are about 20% of total shipments ).

So Apple will only be in trouble in this space if the laptop ceases to become wanted - and that's all about the interface - some apps are better with keyboard and mouse/trackpad and a bigger screen. If all that goes away and we just talk to our computers then I'd argue that Apple are better placed than Lenovo to weather that one.

	▲	bigyabai 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Apple has had "about 10% of the global laptop market" since 2013. If there's some powerful growth driver, I'm not seeing it. The proliferation of web-based enterprise software mostly stands to Windows and ChromeOS' advantage. macOS is the platform that has relied on "native" and "ecosystem" efforts that are becoming increasingly unpopular among consumers and industry pundits that don't like paying per-seat for software services. The Mac Pro used for render farms, on-prem hosting and cluster computing was depreciated completely, driving some of Apple's highest-margin customers over to Linux and Windows servers. Apple has absolutely began their Mac pivot to prosumer/B2C vending, and it's resulted in advertisements and SaaS slop invading macOS. Lenovo will keep selling laptops because that's their product equivalent to the iPhone. Apple's equivalent to the iPhone is... well, the iPhone. If they see an opportunity to force Mac users into an iPad-esque experience, they'll take it in a heartbeat and play coy asking "what's a computer?" like the iPad advertisements. The Mac not an important product for Apple these days, the App Store is.