"There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? "

Are we talking about the same company? Apple is known for focusing on a few things and ignoring others that many believe would be "profitable".

I think Cringley is making a significant point, apple may lose focus on what we think of as computers.

Search for my down voted response on this page. It refers to another HN post where Steve says Apple will continue to make the best computers in the world, meaning he hasn't lost focus on that market.

he also said these things.

“There are no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs was quoted saying to Mossberg. “It turns out people want keyboards…. We look at the tablet, and we think it is going to fail.”

and

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read any more.”

Steve jobs is famous for misleading people with public statements

Steve Jobs is famous for not talking about or acknowledging future products until they are released.

This says nothing about cancelling existing products, and you should not extrapolate it as such.

Can you name one example where Apple has cancelled a successful product? By all accounts, the Mac Pro is a successful and profitable product, so why cancel it? It makes no business sense.

"By all accounts, the Mac Pro is a successful and profitable product, so why cancel it?"

By what accounts exactly? Cringely gave revenue numbers that show that their consumer electronic business is far larger than their pro computer business. This is a basis, you may disagree with the conclusion, but you are exaggerating at best.

Also, I'm not too concerned with them outright canceling it, but I am concerned that they won't particularly care about their computer business. Snow leopard was a very minor update, and I haven't heard anything about the vision for the mac in a long time. I think it's clear that Steve's focus has moved on to the consumer electronic side of their business.

The tablet did fail. They've been trying since the year 2000.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/nov00/11-13...

I don't think the iPad's niche is for reading books. I'm sure Apple has all kinds of cool stuff in their labs that they don't announce because most will never see the light of day. Apple built their "tablet" first then decided that there was a possible market with smart phones. Three years later they did the natural thing and built a big iPhone. I use mine for apps and to browse the web. It's a great little device!

Personally, I would like to see a real tablet (with optional stylus), but at least Apple kickstarted the market in the public's eyes.

You don't have to search hard to find that everything Apple makes, he will assert that it is the best in the world.

Is Apple focused on servers anymore? Is Xserve relegated to a back burner but still profitable? That may be your bellwether.

XServe is really not much of an indicator, since it's always been a pretty poor seller. Apple never did figure out why the likes of Dell and RackSaver rack-mount server solutions cost 2-4x as much as Apple's, and why everyone else kept buying them instead of Apple's far cheaper solutions -- and therefore Apple never fixed their big problem.

You don't pay a premium in that market for nothing -- your rack-mount server has a CPU go up in smoke, and Dell WILL have someone in your datacenter replacing it within 24 hours. That's the part that Apple didn't get -- shipping your box back to the manufacturer just doesn't cut it.

Not to mention, Apple nearly lost the market entirely during the g4 era, and sales in that segment of the market have been largely static since.

The big winner in that was actually Linux though, not Windows.

"There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market?"

They might, if they believe they can make more money investing the same resources in the iPad II.

However, I suspect that won't happen any time soon, because, as long as they're maintaining OS X, they can update the Mac Pro in their sleep. It's all standard technologies, in a pretty ordinary case. They could reduce the Mac Pro department to a handful of industrial designers and one engineer to turn the design into specs Foxconn can build, and still charge $2500 for it.