I think by now many of us recognize that the Mac struggled over the last decade to find meaningful ways to chart a path forward. IMO, the problems started much earlier than that, as Steve’s focus shifted from a successful Intel transition to iPhone, iPad and the future

To me, Mac OS X v10.4 was ‘peak’ Mac OS X. Even at the time, I felt what followed were some very bland, boring OS releases whose primary purpose seemed to be to provide a dev environment to write apps for iPhone & iPad. I used to say OS X was as dull as Apple’s hardware design

At least in sw, it very much felt like Steve’s attention was elsewhere for those years. When we finally came ‘back to the Mac’ w/ Lion (10.7), it cribbed a bunch of bad ideas & the wrong paradigms from iOS. Steve never made it to 10.8, & neither Mac nor iPad seemed to have a plan

In my view, the troubles w/ the Mac lineup people started to notice by 2016 had begun long before and were only starting to surface then. After that, Apple finally got off the fence & made the dramatic decision to enact a multi-year plan to unify the macOS & iOS app platforms

I imagine this swing back to making the Mac all about the things iPhone & iPad can’t or won’t do, instead of being just an alternative consumer computer line to iPad, is how you get to rumors of MacBook Pros w/ more ports, & mid-size tower Macs

I think it’s clear now that Apple envisions a vibrant future for the Mac, both in hardware and in software, and I think it will share a lot more of it with iPhone & iPad than will make some folks comfortable. But that isn’t all bad, is it? — look at the M1

I hope someday we can read about the inflection point when Apple decided they were going to reinvest in the Mac, by resurrecting Mac Pro, Mac mini, MacBook Air after years of neglect. Porting 100s of FWs from iOS over 3 years for Catalyst. Switching to ARM. Supporting iOS apps…

What was /that/ meeting like?