While I agree with you relating to Carbon, Microsoft is pretty much the still only game in town for desktop computing (which also includes laptops and 2-1 hybrids) in worldwide market share.
Go look around anyone doing office work on their phones.
Tablets, sure, when converted into pseudo-laptops, and unless we are talking about iPads here, the European shops are increasingly replacing their Android tablets on sale by Windows 10 laptops with detachable keyboards and touch screen.
As someone that does native/web development, the only area where Web wins are the typical CRUD applications, anything more resource intensive just brings the browser to halt, and for stuff like WebGL it still hit and miss.
As for doing everything and more on a Mac, as much as I like Metal Compute Shaders, they aren't a match to CUDA tooling.
Finally, as much as I like Apple's platforms, they are out of reach for a large segment of the world population, no matter what.
>Go look around anyone doing office work on their phones.
Depends on the office work. A lot of stuff is doable on a phone even, as many common place apps are available, if it wasn't for the ergonomics (small screen, no full keyboard, etc).
>As someone that does native/web development, the only area where Web wins are the typical CRUD applications, anything more resource intensive just brings the browser to halt, and for stuff like WebGL it still hit and miss.
As someone who is a heavy user of the other apps (NLEs, DAWs, drawing/bitmap editing) where the web is a non-starter (and I don't care for all the half-arsed attempts at web-DAWs and such), I agree.
But for business, CRUD apps are 90% of their needs, plus Word/Excel etc, for which Google Docs is a lot of the way there (and even if not, they exist in good shape natively for both Windows and Mac).
>As for doing everything and more on a Mac, as much as I like Metal Compute Shaders, they aren't a match to CUDA tooling.
Perhaps, I don't use CUDA or do 3D at all.
>Finally, as much as I like Apple's platforms, they are out of reach for a large segment of the world population, no matter what.
Sure, but that's also true for workstation-like PCs, and commercial compilers/IDEs, which you're in favor of, no? :-)
Depends on the "workstation like PCs" and "commercial compilers/IDEs".
Anytime I put together a decent PC with best of breed parts, it goes to 3-4K. And commercial offerings from Dell with similar specs also go there, same for laptops, e.g. Lenovo, and the like.
And I've seen commercial compilers/IDEs priced in the $1K/$2K range, with which you can surely buy a Macbook Air or similar...
Naturally there are those that feel entitled to get a Ferrari to go down the grocery store, but that is their problem.
If one is buying enterprise class prices, then it is always going to be more expensive with Apple's hardware, because those compilers and IDEs are not part of Apple's offering, adding to the already expensive hardware price.
And if by hardware workstation, you want a really beefy one, the Apple's alternative is only their top hardware.
Thus at the end of the day, when one does the math of what one is getting per buck/dollar/yen/..., still way over the usual budget on PC side.
