>You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something.

Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment?

I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.

Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.

That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.

Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market.

This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.

It already happened to Apple in the 90s and Jobs explicitly killed it as a strategy and culture in Apple.

I think if they went back to that they’ve lost a serious bit of their DNA.

You mentioned Mac only having a 20% market share. Who has the bigger one?

Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft were unable to stay innovative. All three brands had huge missteps entering emerging market categories. Xerox stumbled during the PC transition, IBM with commodity servers, and Microsoft with mobile. The risk of building a brand is building an inflexible brand that doesn't have the agility to change.

It's true that trying to enter every market and own a huge market share in it can lead to lower risk of having to stay ahead of every innovation (as we can see with Google and its inability to productize AI properly) but since Apple's turnaround its execution has been top notch, and that was 20 years ago. With products like the Vision Pro Apple is explicitly trying to avoid losing the innovation race that Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft did.

> The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.

Market share is the goal, making money is the goal. Market share helps, but it isn't the same thing. MacBooks do pretty well.

Do you even realize that Apple owns most of the above-1000$ laptop market and makes something like 40% of all computer profits because it sells so few computers at such a high price?

I'd love to be not successful making a luxury product that sells at commodity volume.

> Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not.

This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.

> The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.

I've heard this same boring claim now for about 20 years. It was wrong as a broad statement twenty years ago, and such a statement I would hazard is still wrong now.

I've had a twenty year career in IT. Starting with PC repair and working for a PC OEM, however the vast majority of my career has been spent in fields involving Linux. (Linux Administrator/Systems Engineering/DevOPS through to executive leadership). I know how computers work, I know how the hardware works, I know the relative value of parts that go into things, yes I can, always have, and still will build machines including using on a regular basis all major operating systems in place today and despite all of this, I still remain an Apple customer and its not because im some dumbo non technical individual tricked by apples fancy marketing voodoo.

It's because for those twenty years Apple has consistently conducted themselves in a way with me personally that for the vast majority of cases, has served me best as a user and as their customer. As opposed to some third party who is paying them to exploit me through their operating system or some mass of adware shipped with their operating system, not just this years profit margins, not just for as long as im in the store and to which afterwards im left alone once ive paid them with a "fuck you, got mine."

Just a few of the events of the past twenty years that have kept me as an apple customer:

* 2006ish era macbook. HDD dies at random just outside of warranty. No local apple stores at the time. Local authorised repairer spends two weeks dicking me around on a fix, nothing. I push it to Apple who was not even local at the time. A week later I have a BRAND NEW macbook, not just a drive, outside of warranty, complete with brand new warranty, an additional year tacked on top and an apology for the service I had received. (We now have apple stores so this would not occur again I imagine.)

* 2014ish iPhone. Much like the macbook I start having issues outside of warranty, it is unable to be debugged in store. Dude wanders away, comes back. "Have you got a backup?", "Yes?", "We'll just give you a refurb, newer model, with warranty, are you happy with that?" "lol, yes I am."

* 2012 15" MacBook pro retina battery replacement - Battery dies outside of warranty in around 2017 and im informed no stock currently exists in the country, and that i'll be waiting months if I wanted a replacement. I am immediately informed that if I do not want to wait, I can instead have a significantly more powerful, and higher specced refurb model, complete with brand new warranty in place of waiting the month for a replacement. I took the replacement. Again, this machine was OUTSIDE of the warranty window. That one retina MBP purchase due to this replacement saw my laptop needs covered for a decade.

This is only touching on a tiny amount of the circumstances that have led to me remaining to continue investigating the purchase of products from Apple. Not everyone will have had these interactions, or come away from Apple positively, and perhaps one day, I also will not and my opinions will change. But at this point, from the day I became a customer through now, I have received a better long term support experience as a customer from Apple, then I have from any other organisation on the planet.

> > Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not.

> This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.

Yeah, the GP's personal opinion seems very much the opposite (like yours) as well. Quote:

"I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built."

Not sure what caused the dissonance. Seems like trying to prove they're not an Apple fanboy or sth.

MacBook Pros are a highly differentiated product from other laptops; for instance they have an entirely different OS and CPU architecture.