The Mac isn't a "walled garden". MacOS is a Unix. Losing Apple as a CPU customer adds another dent into Intels revenue. On its own, it wouldn't be decisive, but in a time of sinking market share, you don't want this to happen.
Also, it will be interesting how Apples market share develops, as th AS could make the Macs much more attractive. Both from the performance and price and of course, because of the iOS compatibility.
>Also, it will be interesting how Apples market share develops, as th AS could make the Macs much more attractive. Both from the performance and price and of course, because of the iOS compatibility.
Apple's pricing strategy over the past few years has been to reduce the entry-level costs of their devices thus increasing their marketshare, ecosystem lock-in and services revenue. It's the strategy they've employed with the entry level iPad, iPhone SE and Apple Watch SE, and I fully expect them to bring to same strategy to the Mac, now that they no longer have to pay Intel's profit margins.
We'll very likely see a MacBook in the $700 price range in the upcoming months. That would put the price of Apple's entry-level MacBook right around the that of an average notebook computer in the United States, while providing far better performance than their competitors in that price range (see A14 benchmarks). This would naturally provide Apple with a big marketshare boost in the consumer notebook space.
Ultimately nobody but Apple knows exactly what their pricing strategy will be with Apple Silicon based notebooks. However, if I were competing with Apple in this space, I'd be tremendously concerned.
Were I in Apple's shoes, I'd be making a laptop that's cheap enough that everything cheaper is a bad computer. I'd want half of all freshmen to get that laptop. $700 sounds about right, $600 would nail it.
On the software side you have Gatekeeper and SIP. On the hardware side you have T2, soldered RAM, their weird custom SSDs, and their lawsuits against hackintosh manufacturers.
Yes, there are still ways around some of them, but it's pretty obvious where they want things to go.
Gatekeeper has been around for 10 years and every year people have predicted you couldn't install software outside of the app store. It never came by. As a development machine, it just wouldn't work.
No. For a general purpose machine, especially for developers, you need the ability to access your files freely and to run any program. If that is no longer given, all developers and most users would drop the platform.
Also, it completely doesn't make sense as long as you allow virtualisation. Which Apple not only does, they even demoed this capabiltiy in the keynote.
Also, it will be interesting how Apples market share develops, as th AS could make the Macs much more attractive. Both from the performance and price and of course, because of the iOS compatibility.