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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

While I don't think your analysis is wrong, I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners.

iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter.

If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years.

That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.

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I don't think the iOS-ification is overblown at all. The fact that unsigned apps are met with increased hostility, and increased hoops to jump through to run them, demonstrates this. It's not hard to imagine in the next couple of macos releases that homebrew stops working, or requires grotesque hacks like local building/linking to escape the signing requirements.

Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.

Signed apps is not iOS-ification. That's just normal, sane security practices.

Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team:

"Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!"

https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/

> I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners.

A very important percentage. E.g. Final Cut used to have a 60% market share. Now it's may be 25%?

There's most likely a dip among every other category of professional users.

Final Cut is a very old product (1998). The entire market for digital editing has expanded greatly since then.

We don't know because Apple doesn't report it, but I would surmise that Final Cut has had a consistently growing user base.

They lost most of the market for two reasons:

- Final Cut X was a major re-write that didn't support importing old project formats for something like two years and didn't support all required video formats for the same period

- Mac Pro was abandoned, twice. Once for years before the trashcan design. Once for years after the trashcan design.

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