Tell them, my song.

Two more years, and macOS and the Mac will have entered the eternal hunting grounds. Apple is killing the Mac, and they have been doing so for years already. If you haven’t noticed the signs, then it’s because you intentionally chose to be blind to them.

The “pro” applications have been killed or turned into consumer products. They turned Final Cut into an iMovie-wannabe, but the best example is Aperture. Aperture, the best thing since sliced bread for putting huge amounts of digital photos in a library, along with nice processing and editing capabilities, has been brutally murdered by Apple and instead they gave us a toy software called photos that, pardon my French, cannot do shit. If anything clearly said “get the heck out of here”, then it was this message.

Apple couldn’t care less for their deskop hardware. The Mac Pro is hopelessly out-dated and, let’s say you want to play games on that machine once in a while, it cannot even compete with a 1,000 Euro Windows PC anymore. At the current pace of updates, the Mac Mini will soon be out-performed by a Raspberry Pi. And the iMac… Well. At least it’s thin. Because that is all that matters in the fashion world of Apple, right?

Now the notebooks. Oh, the notebooks. They got a touch-bar. You know, a touch screen that kills effective usability by making you focus on the keyboard instead of the screen. Because, well, real touch screens are no good with macOS, so they have to come up with an excuse for their lack of interest in developing something that might actually be useful and usable with a desktop OS. After all, they only care for iOS and want you to go there and be locked into their tight and fully controlled iOS ecosystem.

So why is there still a Mac at all? Xcode. They still need to give developers a tool to write iOS software. They don’t care for macOS software, because iOS is what brings the big bucks.

I’m not sure which way they will eventually go, but here are a few possibilites:

• iOS will become “self-hosting” and there will be a developer version of iOS with an iOS device that can run Xcode and compile software. Think of a larger iPad Pro with an external keyboard and maybe even proper mouse support (Android can do it, so could iOS). They could then kill the Mac.
• Or they will port Xcode to Linux and simply kill off macOS and discontinue the Mac hardware. (I doubt they would ever port Xcode to Windows.)
• They sell the Mac unit to someone else and put macOS on extended life support until the first option – self-hosting iOS – becomes feasible. So someone else would have to fight with the hardware business and they just keep supporting the macOS software half-heartedly.
• I doubt Apple would ever fully open source macOS. That’s just not in Apple’s DNA. But, of course, it would be the most desirable option for all Mac users. At least the platform would stay around.

Whatever direction this will go — the Mac has been demoted to be a “surf-board for Starbucks customers” and does not have much of a future left.