Hacker News Reader

Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

> "Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales."

I'd say hardware sales like that are impressive, coming from a software company.

Apple's original core competency was creating hardware, with the software existing to drive hardware sales. (That there is a "hack" in "hackintosh" suggests that this should still be true today. They don't want you to buy their OS and run it on your own hardware, but they're fine with you buying their hardware and running your own OS on it.) Microsoft's core 'competency' has always been software. (I am of course abusing the term 'competency' in this case...)

View on HN

Apple’s Mac sales are minuscule though in the grand scheme of things and only a small part of their revenue.

Their other products, while locked down to forbid running third party operating systems, are still nevertheless hardware. With the exception of itunes and safari on Windows, virtually everything Apple does involves selling hardware to consumers.

iTunes on Windows was to sell iPods.

Bingo. So that leaves Safari, which apparently no longer supports Windows but once did in the past.

Apple has a number of services available on other platforms, such as Apple Music.

I remember one story about a computer store in old days that carried lots of systems and parts. The new management decided to optimize this and carry only the popular choices and thus increase the profits. But the profits dropped instead. Before that the place was frequented by tech lovers. When their non-tech friends asked what and where to buy, they referred them there. Once the place was not good for tech people, the schema broke.

Mac sales may be small, but they are important part of the system. Who will write all these apps and on what hardware?

Developers will buy Macs and write apps for iOS regardless because that’s where the money is. Just like game developers use to buy expensive, obtuse, proprietary setups to write games for mobile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com