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Comment by neild | Hacker News Reader

Macs accounted for 27% of Apple's net sales in FY '10. Mac sales were up 26% over the previous year. In comparison, iPods accounted for 13% of net sales and, and grew only 2% over the previous year.

Why, precisely, do you expect Apple to just throw away 25% of their business?

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Dropping the mac line doesn't necessarily equate to terminating OSX.

Think of it this way. Imagine that Apple just came out of nowhere and released the iPhone, iPad, and iPod line. Do you think their next move would be to launch a line of proprietary computers?

If you pitched that idea to Jobs, you'd probably be looking for work the next day. It would be that dumb.

Maybe or maybe not, but that doesn't matter. They already sell computers and have lots of customers who want to buy them. I don't know much about business, but I would still have to say that it sounds just stupid to suddenly stop selling them.

What would they write the iOS apps with? Mac OS X is critical to all of Apple's products.

See my other point. Does Sony have to build a line of proprietary PCs so that people can develop for the PS3?

Of course they do, the most recent one is called the "PlayStation 3 Reference Tool", and costs about $10k to a qualified developer.

That's just a specialized version of the console used as a hardware debugger. They probably make about 200 of those a year. Actual development work is done on a perfectly ordinary Windows PC.

There's a big difference if one product line that used to take 70% of business is down to 25% because of declining sales OR if it is because of fact that some new product line got to be so wildly successful that it overshadowed the former champions.

I believe that iPod was supposed to be a complement of Mac but then it and its siblings grew so big that actually now other products are selling Macs.

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