Even $100B is not a reason to dump money mindlessly. I generally don't trust moves that seem purely driven by money (e.g. facebook's VR hiring spree), and which don't have a clear goal in mind, and a strategy along the way. Given Apple's high aspirations, they probably don't know what to do with the desktop. Ive's expectations seem way beyond what native apps can fulfill ... perhaps the Windows way was the right approach after all, and the complexity of "other" operating systems was just right for the high complexity of daily tasks after all ... and maybe the Apple way of thinking is more apt for mobile use where the computer interface doesn't have the user's full attention.

Personally, in my last years of using OS X, all I had open was the PDF reader app, a browser and a terminal. I don't know if that was my personal interpretation of the Cloud age, but suddenly I was completely OS agnostic. Incidentally, this led me away from buying Macs, as the operating system didn't do anything for me anymore. I don't know about the desktop experience. Either it seems to be "power user web crawling", for which the cloud is the best fit, or it's about spending the whole day in a random Pro App with its very own user experience.

I'm looking forward for their cars and watches, but I don't care much about their desktop computers. It seems they don't, either.

I think it's pretty one dimensional to call Facebook's VR acquisitions purely motivated by having a pile of cash laying around.

There are plenty of smart people who see VR finally coming around to be the disruptive technology that it was thought to be 25 years ago.