It seems to me like Apple has been on the road to slowly abandoning the Mac for quite some time. Newer Macbooks are unpopular, updates to OS X have problems, and on the whole, the platform just doesn't get much love from Apple. They want us all on iOS.

I'll be moving to Linux instead.

I think only apple ally is Adobe. If you want to do pro design or video you need adobe. Adobe will never release on Linux so if you dont want to use privacy killing cloud os like windows 10 then you are left with mac.

Hackintosh is way many people are taking for those reasons.

The “newer MacBooks” are unpopular is just a meme in the tech bubble. While Apple will stop reporting unit sells next quarter, they just posted last quarters numbers. There is no indication that they are “unpopular”.

Maybe they still sell, but I know of nobody who is enthusiastic about them. People used to love them.

Why should we pay more credence to the anecdotal “people you know” instead of the reported sales volumes?

That is Sales Volume, but its 100M Active Devices, is way slower than what most predicted. Apple took more than 2 years to add 10M Active Devices, on a ~40+M Unit sold during that time, that means 30M are either replacement or, there are quite a high churn rate to Mac. It is possibly the only reason why Apple suddenly come up with iMac Pro, new MacBook Retina etc. It wasn't the sales that matters, it was user leaving its platform. By previous trend and growth at a nearly consistent 20M unit per year, Mac should have at least 120M Active Devices by now, if not more.

Why does Apple care about active users for the Mac and not sales volume?

Active users for iOS devices makes sense. Apple gets recurring revenue from iOS users. Hardly anyone uses the Mac App Store or buys iCloud storage just for the Mac and OS upgrades are free.

You will need a user base for Software Distribution. Will you design your software for a 10M or 100M Mac user. If you are changing to a Services product that only oriented around your products, the more user the better.

It depends on the software...

I wouldn't care about the overall number of users, just the number of users in the market that I'm targeting. The creative market didn't abandon Apple when the overall Mac market was in dire straights because the market they cared about still had a lot of Mac users.

From what I can see, the consumer market for software is basically dead. Is anyone making serious money on non game personal computer software besides Adobe and Microsoft?

The smaller Mac only software companies are going by the "thousand true fans" strategy. Stay small and get a small loyal customer base.

It's a little funny how stable the desktop ecosystem has been for 10 (or maybe 30?) years.

Mac gaming still sucks, EE/ME/Enterprise engineers use windows. Web devs and Artists use macs. Academics and scientists use Linux.

These ecosystems are so stable now that I don't see it changing.

Granted, it could change, but they would have to really try... And Apple has shown decreasing vision for the Mac platform over time.

> Mac is now left with Programming, and Video / Graphics Editing.

You forgot Audio, which is HUGE on the Mac.