Where did you find those numbers?

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4...

In Q4 of 2018, Apple sold 4.9 million Macs. Lenovo alone sold 16.6 million PC's. All brands except apple sold 63.7 million.

I could include Watches and AppleTVs but those are far from generally purpose computing devices.

But regardless, if you are referring to “successful”. Which I’m discussing, success from a business standpoint is profitable. Apple is definitely making more in profit and revenue than Microsoft. As in, Apple had the more successful strategy.

There are plenty of people whose only computing device is a phone and others who are hardly ever use a computer for personal use. Even the iPhone can keep up performance wise with some low end PCs being sold.

But I said variants. But, if you take MacOS out, the statement remains.

And seeing that iOS is now running Microsoft Office a version of Photoshop and is using more powerful processors than most x86 based PCs, we can complete take out MacOS and just iOS.

I said nothing about popularity, I was saying successful. Success in a business isn’t marketshare or popularity its profitability. Seeing how little profit that OEMs are making selling either Android devices (most of whom are losing money - except for Samsung) or PCs, I wouldn’t be surprised that Apple is more successful than all of the PC makers combined selling Macs and its well known that Apple captures more than 70% of the profit in mobile.

A company can’t stay viable based on “marketshars”. Next am I arguing what’s “best”. Do you think Dell would rather be in Apple’s position with “market share” or Apple’s in Dell’s?

There are plenty of people whose only personal computing device is their phone either by choice or necessity. Heck I am a developer and the only thing I use my computer at home for is as a Plex server.

It’s on my list to get a powerful enough NAS to transcode movies and I won’t even use it for that. I’ll run Plex and bit torrent (to uhh download Linux ISO’s) and B2 backed cloud backup app directly on it.

My wife gave her computer to our son because she uses her iPad for everything including Office.

Now that Apple (finally) supports a mouse, I connect my same Bluetooth keyboard+mouse to my iPad that I use for my work computer when I bring it home.

The people you know. Not everyone can afford to buy a desktop computer, and for many of these people a phone is their primary computing device.

As an outsider, it is very difficult for me to understand Apple's story on whether these devices are, or are not, on the same OS; what its/their "root" was; and what's the future direction (separate OS, or convergence, and if latter which one will form the core and which one will transform). The newest "iPad OS" or whatever it is called does not help matters - again, as an outsider, I cannot tell if this is a marketing differentiation or a true one.

All that being said, I rather thought that iPhones & iPads run "iOS", and Macs run "OSX", and that they were different.

Apple acquired Next and they combined some parts of classic MacOS and NextStep to create OS X.

Apple then stripped OS X down, got rid of some Mac specific parts, added some new frameworks to create “iPhone OS” and introduced the iPhone Initially they claimed that the iPhone was “.running OS X”.

They introduced the iPod Touch later the same year and the iPad 3 years later at this point, they renamed “iPhone OS” to “iOS”.

They introduced watchOS and tvOS as more variants of iOS. There is also some iOS variant running on HomePods.

Over the years the two operating systems have both somewhat diverged and they still share both some old code and new code between the two.

This year, they renamed the version of iOS running on the iPad “iPadOS” as they started adding more iPad specific features.

They also introduced the “Catalyst” framework to bring iOS specific frameworks to the Mac to make porting from iPad to the Mac easier.

Finally, they introduced Swift UI as a common cross platform framework for watchOS, iOS, macOS, iPadOS and tvOS.

- Cocoa

- Objective-C

- XNU

It used to be all based on pure Darwin (also from Apple, but OSS). But since the iOS releases it has been diversified too much and Apple no longer wanted to backport to their own OSS (but they still backport to all GPLv2 and lower).

Oh, come on. That's profoundly misleading and you know it.

Yes.

Which is just two variants

meanwhile Windows 7 support will end in 2020 and is still being sold

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-s...

I didn’t say that MS isn’t good at maintaining backwards compatibility. My mom in fact uses my old Mac Mini 1.66Ghz Core Duo introduced in 2006 running Windows 7 and I just retired a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop introduced in 2009 from running my Plex Server running Windows 10.

I’m saying that it hasn’t been a sound business strategy as the rest of the tech industry has moved on. Windows (not Microsoft) has failed in the cloud, the web browser market, and mobile.

I don't agree on the Cloud, it's the strongest competitor to Amazon, and on the other businesses there is no competition: mobile and browser is Google.

Amazon failed as well in the mobile business.

As far as mobile being “google”. In terms of revenue, it came out in the Oracle lawsuit that Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence. Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones. Google also reportedly still pays Apple $8 billion a year to bectge default search engine in Apple devices.

as a server, maybe.

as a client not really.

> Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence

Yeah, they are good at hiding profits

and they are an ADV company which dominated the mobile market because it was strategic, they don't need to profit from selling (and manufacturing) the HW, they just need your screen time.

There are between 2.5 and 3 billion android devices around the world.

And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.

> Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones.

That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.

In 2018 thy made $33.36 billions, down of 9.2% from the previous year.

If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.

But people would still watch YouTube advs on iPhone replacements.

You think Google lied under discovery? Oracle wasn’t just counting their meager hardware sells but they were also counting as sales, Google Play revenue etc.

And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.

There is a country that has over 1 billion people running Android with no Google Services.

That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.

And it’s still about the same as MS’s revenue last quarter at 38 billion

If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.

Apple is far more diversified than Google. Almost all of Google’s profits come from advertising, 48% of Apple’s revenue come from the iPhones.

The Mac business by itself is about the size of McDonald’s the last time I checked.

Estimates for Youtube is that it’s barely profitable if at all.

I think the known taxable profits are only a fraction of the real profits.

Don't jump to conclusions, just because you wanna prove a point.

> There is a country that has over 1 billion people running Android with no Google Services.

so you're agreeing with me: it's almost impossible, the alternative is live in China and give up your freedom.

Because you can't use Chinese services outside China.

There's also that.

Anyway Google China it's a thing.

And at this point I would prefer China spying on me than Google.

Maybe Europe should start banning US services as well...

> Apple is far more diversified than Google.

Is it?

Mac HW is less than 10% of their revenues.

What else they produce?

Could Apple really survive out of wearables or iPads or iCloud without iPhones?

I seriously doubt it.

> Estimates for Youtube is that it’s barely profitable if at all.

Nobody knows how big YouTube really is

Estimates are in the range 16-25 billion dollars / year

This is a fancy way of saying that Apple sells more watches and phones than Microsoft does computers, which is a whole lot less impressive than the disinformation version you wrote above.

When I look at the microsoft ecosystem: something like 90% of all computers, nearly every corporation and business in the world, etc, I don't see anything to be ashamed of.

How is it “disinformation”? Do you think anyone on HN doesn’t understand the statement to mean what I said for it to mean? I said nothing about the computers MS sells (the Surface line). I said Windows PCs in general.

Microsoft sells a lot of Windows licenses to business and consumers but all of the energy from a development and usage standpoint is on the web. I bet most businesses could replace a lot of their computers with Chrome OS boxes and not miss a beat.

Apple sells a >$1000 phone labeled for "Professionals" which comes with 32GB of on board memory.... total. When you upcharge high end customers $150 for a $15 stick of NAND, yeah, people are more touchy about 8GB of system file

It’s not about the “system file”. It’s also about RAM usage. Lowend Surface laptops come with the same amount of storage as iPads but between using x86 chips that are a lot slower and less energy efficient and the boost of Windows, it’s nowhere near the same experience.

No iPhone Pro comes with less than the 64GB of storage. Do you really want to talk about marginal price and marginal cost? A Windows license has no marginal cost.

At least one person[0] didn't understand and publicly stated as much. While iOS was originally spun off from macOS, it's very much it's own system, with there being no ability to run macOS applications on iOS, and vice versa (although the latter is slowly changing with recent macOS releases). Comparing the two is disingenuous at best.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452862

EDIT: And here's at least one more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21453368

Most iOS app can run on MacOS - the iPhone simulator compiles iOS code natively to x86 and links to an x86 version of the iOS frameworks.

Apple also introduced both catalyst and SwiftUI to make porting back and forth easier.

And yes “words mean things”. I specifically said “variants.” So if again you want to be pedantic, I could just as easily say that Apple sells more iOS devices than all Windows PC makers combined.

Also, if you want to try to exclude iPads from the iOS ecosystem because Apple now calls it “iPadOS”, iPads can still run iPhone apps.

Yeah, except no app developer ships their simulator build to customers to run in the iOS Simulator…

Even in their crowning achievement - the cloud, they are a distant second to AWS and Amazon always brags that they run more Windows instances in AWS than Microsoft runs on Azure.

MS’s revenue is half that of Apple’s and they have lower profits. Heck, last quarter Apple made about the same as Microsoft even if you subtract iPhone revenue.

They missed out on mobile for sure, but it's not because of their focus on the enterprise or backwards compatibility, and you'll have a very hard time proving so. Also they haven't missed out on the web either, and neither can you prove that they did. Just because there is a bigger cloud provider doesn't mean that they 'missed out'. And there will be bigger fish to fry, new technologies are coming out every year.

Apple and Microsoft are in vastly different spaces. Apple focuses on consumer products, Microsoft makes its money from the enterprise. An Apples to orange comparison is not meaningful.

As far as mobile, Apple was able to take its much smaller less bloated OS, cut it down to a size that could fit on a device with 128MB of RAM and have for what at the time was a full featured web browser. Did you ever use IE on a Win CE device?

And are you forgetting that Microsoft was the dominant consumer operating platform before mobile? MS didn’t have any choice but to retreat to Enterprise.

So what “bigger technologies” do you see coming out then mobile? The smart phone already has an 80%+ worldwide penetration rate of adults.

They run windows at Google HQ and AWS but you don't see anyone saying Google and Amazon "missed out"

Besides, if you're comparing MS and Apple, you need to include all the VMs running Windows (it's not a physical device - but MS makes the same amount of money on it), and also MS's foothold in Cloud.

Apple practically does not exist in those spaces, and Microsoft would have been in the same position had it broke compat as often as Apple does on the desktop.