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Apple's Share of PC Users Drops To A Five-Year Low (infoworld.com)
Windows 10 is installed on 24.5% of devices -- but that's only half the story. "Apple's Mac share of personal computers worldwide fell to a five-year low in December," reports Computerworld, adding that Linux and Windows "both benefited, with increases of around a half percentage point during 2016."
An anonymous reader quotes their report:
According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Apple's desktop and notebook operating system -- formerly OS X, now macOS -- powered just 6.1% of all personal computers last month, down from 7% a year ago and a peak of 9.6% as recently as April 2016... The Mac's 6.1% user share in December was the lowest mark recorded by Net Applications since August 2011, more than five years ago... In October, the company reported sales of 4.9 million Macs for the September quarter, a 14% year-over-year decline and the fourth straight quarterly downturn. Apple's sales slide during the past 12 months has been steeper than for the personal computer industry as a whole, according to industry researchers from IDC and Gartner, a 180-degree shift from the prior 30 or so quarters, when the Mac's growth rate repeatedly beat the business average.
Apple's success through 2016 was "fueled by Microsoft's stumbles with Windows 8 and a race-to-the-bottom mentality among rival OEMs," according to the article, which also notes that the user share for Linux exceeded 2% in June, and reached 2.3% by November.
Apple's success through 2016 was "fueled by Microsoft's stumbles with Windows 8 and a race-to-the-bottom mentality among rival OEMs," according to the article, which also notes that the user share for Linux exceeded 2% in June, and reached 2.3% by November.
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Apple is no longer interested in my business. I use an old 15" MBP and it does everything I want, and has almost every port I need. The new MBP's simply suck in comparison. A "touch bar"??? Hey, Apple, I got something you can touch, and it isnt my money. Dongles? I use one dongle now. With the new MBP I'd need a dongle for everything. When Apple makes a MBP that is upgradable and has the ports that people need now and has noticeably better performance, I'll consider it. Windows is starting to look better and better.
A post Jobs Apple has stagnated. A big, dead, and stinky whale in the water. They stopped innovating and started going for gimmicks and shine. Removing 3.5mm jacks, sacrificing competitive battery performance for thinness not being demanded by consumers. Then you have a MacBook "Pro" that basically kicks professionals in the pants. As an owner of an iPhone 6s Plus and two 2014 MacBook pros, these will likely be my last devices when they go. I run commercial real estate during the day, but do photography on the side and it's expanding to a more primary business. stripping SD card slots and standardising to only USB-C is hardly pro, especially when a lot of us rely on older equipment from time to time in creative fields (like my Kodak film scanner).
Apple lost its way. It hasn't innovated in a long time. It's become a corporate version of click bait products. The touch bar, the "thinness"... these things would make sense if consumers were asking for them. Everywhere I turn, they aren't. So Apple is trying a forced-down innovation in their vision. Historically, this never works because even if consumers don't know exactly what it is they need, they won't take something they don't want just because you've crammed it down their throats.
Now that Microsoft has embraced opensource a bit more and Win 10 is more polished, the excuses for Apple software, which is lagging desperately behind in features, even begins to lose steam. RIP, Apple.
While they continue to pull defeat from the jaws of victory with baffling regularity(eg. needlessly atrocious touchpads for no obvious reason); it's amazing how much less-bad your average PC laptop is today, when compared to the race-to-the-bottom and "Yeah, it's a 15in low-res screen and 2 inches thick" era. Models that can go directly head-to-head with Apple's finest are rarer; but you can often save enough money, vs. the really classy Apple gear, that a few minor sins can be overlooked. Combine that with Apple's more or less total neglect of anything desktop/workstation, which is a boring segment but moves a lot of hardware; and the fair success of Chromebooks as practically-disposable cheap 'n portable options; and you have a few reasons why OSX marketshare might not be doing as well outside of the truly devoted.
Back in the day, an ibook/macbook was both good and actually one of the cheaper options if you needed something small and light; mac minis stacked up reasonably favorably against all but the most atrocious cheapy towers; and Mac Pros were pretty respectably priced workstation offerings. I remember, back when they were still doing the intel-based 'cheese grater' case Pros; we were a Dell shop but when we priced out the Pros vs. equivalent Precisions our Dell rep turned a slightly unhealthy color and had to cut us a deal to make it worth going with those rather than just bootcamping the macs. That...isn't exactly...how the world works anymore.
They abandoned productivity computing users almost entirely.
Appliance-style computers with high-end sensory specs, rather than modular ones with high-end throughput specs.
Abandonment of "professional" tier applications, integrations, and support.
Marketing and product development that targeted information consumption rather than production and manipulation.
Modifications primarily to the computing platform whenever computing and mobile needed to be brought closer.
Not so long ago Mac OS was a compelling computing platform at the hardware and at the software level for many professionals, including many computing professionals like me (who were once hardcore Linux/*nix users).
This is no longer the case. With the changes that have been made over the last few years, Mac OS and related hardware are now also-rans, but ones that come at a significant cost premium and with significant limitations.
Meanwhile, they have avoided the (often controversial) wisdom of Steve Jobs, who tended to cannibalize existing product lines and userbases with new ones in order to stay ahead of the curve. Instead, they have worked hard not to cannibalize and/or risk the iOS userbase (designing instead for its lowest common denominator, which is low indeed) by upgrading or innovating in iOS.
The result is that Mac OS is no longer a viable (much less obvious) choice for professionals even in many of its traditional constituencies, while iOS has stagnated and is now significantly behind Android in many ways.
I don't think all of this would have happened under Steve Jobs, who would have continued to be controversial, and also would have continued to make gains but in often surprising ways that would only be grudgingly conceded later on.
With Tim Cook they got a traditional bean-counter who carried Apple back into the traditional corporate cycle of aggressive rise, complacent dominance, unavoidable fall.
I'm annoyed that I'll have to switch computing platforms again—the switch from Linux was not easy after 17 years when I made it in 2010—but I suspect that I will.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
And Valve is no longer a game developer.
They are a gambling site and games retailer.
Both succeed in their attempts to gain more money =P
My first computer was an Apple IIGS. I've owned more Macs then I can remember. I was responsible for Macs being adopted by my workplace. And yet, I very much doubt my next computer will be a Mac. Poor hardware choices are really the last straw. Chances are good my next rig will be a Dell XPS running Ubuntu.
I find it surprising that according to this statistic one third of Mac users stopped using Macs during the last 8 months. Or did the market grow a lot (don't think so)? I can see that some Mac users would switch to Windows (or occasionally to Linux), but one third in 8 months? Seems actually unlikely.
People were waiting for a good Mac refresh in 2016. The macbook pro finally came out but to mixed reviews. The direction Apple is going with their computers is hard to say. More adapters to lug around....Some screens get improvements while others do not...things changed for the sake of change. Why upgrade your 4 yr old computer when the new one has the very same screen? There will be a bump if Apple spends more of an effort to refresh their computer lineup. I have a 4 yr old 11 inch mac air and I still see no reason to upgrade. I am definitely not in the minority.
Apple is also losing the battle in education. There are almost 100,000 schools in the US and until about 5 years ago, many ran Apple computers in their classrooms.
Chromebooks have eaten Apple's lunch almost entirely in that space.
Cutting Tim Cook's pay is not enough - Microsoft put a tech guy in charge of the company - it's time for Apple to do the same.
Apple was a "just works" solution for people who didn't want to be bothered with their computer to do what they actually wanted to do. And Apple delivered that beautifully. Not to me, I never got my mind wrapped around the "Apple way" of thinking, but I could easily see it with the various people I used to admin PCs for. They quickly fell in love with the intuitive interface (beats me how this is intuitive, but they thought so) and how "naturally" everything felt (personally, I felt it was all wrong). But it wasn't for me, it was for them, and for them, it worked perfectly. There also was never an issue with odd drivers or having to upgrade them, Apple did that for you. There was also never an issue with having to buy some additional reader for whatever esoteric memory medium your digital cam used, your Apple could read it. Out of the box. Without you having to install anything. Even the most cryptic format nobody heard about, your Apple would read it and seamlessly let you work with it, it organizes your files for you, it was the perfect computer for people who just wanted to do stuff without having to learn how to do it.
Quite frankly, Apple's engineers apparently spent a lot of time employing people like my dad telling them what they want to do and they designed the software to "think" for the user. That was the key asset for Apple. And they threw that away.
No, not with the software. That probably still works the way it did. But with the hardware. Again, one of the key selling points for Apple was that their machines could read anything you could possibly throw at them. And that is simply no longer the case. They can't even read USB out of the box anymore. Instead you are supposed to buy a lot of additional crap, various cables for various reasons that confuse and overwhelm people. Which one do I need? And I don't want to buy the wrong one, they're all quite expensive.
Apple replaced total compatibility with absolute incompatibility. They saw that they can cram it down their users' throats in the phone market and tried the same stunt with their computers. And now they get to learn the MS lesson: Just 'cause you can piss on your customers in a market you dominate doesn't mean that it will work everywhere.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am a creative professional in the online, SaaS, new media publishing era. I should easily be in the traditional Mac OS demographic.
I am using a 17" 2010 MBP. It has been maxed to 16GB RAM and dual internal large SSDs. I regularly use all of the ports that it offers. Even though the screen resolution is lower, I use the larger screen because I often have side-by-side windows open running SublimeText and/or some IDE, and doing that on 15" or less introduces eyestrain, even with the higher resolutions (which are mostly supported only in a way that adds visual actuance/sharpness, not in a way that increases available workspace). Density is cute for photos, but for reading and working in text, density < surface area.
I was an iPhone early adopter. I had been using smartphones for years (Palm at the time that iPhone was released), and iOS was a revelation early on. Absolute game-changer once apps happened.
Talk to me in 2009/2010 and I am a hardcore Apple supporter. I am running my old Linux applications in X, have a shell window open all the time, have access to pro-grade multimedia and development tools, and every part of the product line enhances the productivity of every other part seamlessly. They get it and they are enabling me to do my work like nobody else.
I recommend Apple's ecosystem to friend/family/co-workers without hesitation.
Now? The Mac is 7 years old. There is no device currently in Apple's lineup that would better serve my needs. I can't buy something from Apple, at any price, that I'd want to replace it with.
Many of the Applications that I previously used on it—Aperture, Final Cut, even iWork—have either been retired by Apple or hobbled by Apple, leading me to purchase third party alternatives, e.g. from Adobe, that are also supported on other platforms. The transitions were a pain in the ass, but now I've made them, so I'm no longer facing the resistance to switching that comes from losing all your applications and workflows.
And while iOS was once inimitable, nothing like it, enables many more things than any competitor, now I use Samsung Galaxy Tab S machines and a Panasonic CM1 Android phone. They give me shell access, expandable storage to move files around, and hardware that is better for mobile (better camera, better portability/weight, etc.) than iOS does.
In short, I'm an savvy computing professional, not someone easily swayed by marketing speak, and Apple isn't selling a single thing that I want. I've gone from an Apple house (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Time Machine for router/backup) to a mixed house (Mac, Android phone, Android tablet, Roku, third-party NAS).
The only Apple item left is the Mac, and in a year or two it'll probably go and be replaced with a Dell/Samsung/Asus high-end machine running Linux.
There is no reason Apple had to lose me, they just didn't continue to make products that would enable me to get my work done more efficiently than the alternatives, which is what Apple used to do with shocking skill. But now?
Like I said, there's not a single thing in Apple's product line that I want to buy or that seems like a good investment from the productivity perspective. That's a complete and shocking inversion from the late '00s.
I now recommend Windows 10 or Linux and Android to everyone, and Chromebooks for those that just browse and type papers.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It just looks like people are moving to tablets and phones over laptops and desktops in general. In addition, speed bumps for CPUs and GPUs aren't really noticable to non-gamers, I've been able to stick with the same machines for a long time now. On my MacBook Pro I'm running Linux so I wasn't affected by Apple cutting off OS support. It's still as speedy as ever.
Twinstiq, game news
Consumers aren't buying PCs anymore in volume.
Hence, Apple should aim the MacPro at the literal "PROFESSIONAL" market only.
The cost of a MacPro is less than the total cost of the software on the system. I pay more for CAD licenses in the lifetime of my MacPro than the cost of the MacPro.
Get it? Cook? Just my opinion.
> it depends on how you count. I'd count what people use.
Isn't that exactly what they were counting and found declined?
Seriously, it would make just about everybody happy. The designs must use aluminium cases, and they must be approved by Apple before manufacture. The Apple logo will be on the cover, and the manufacturer's logo will be over the keyboard.
PCs are no longer Apple's core competence, and they should make moves to divest the function.
Problem solved.
I agree that this sucks, but the fault is with Intel, not Apple. The only quad-core mobile chips that Intel is currently shipping support a maximum of 16GB if you use DDR3 or LPDDR3, or 32GB if you use DDR4 (and don't support LPDDR4). The difference in power between 16GB of LPDDR3 and 32GB of DDR4 is huge and would take 2-3 hours from the battery life (and have a big impact even when in suspend mode, because the RAM remains powered unless you suspend to disk and pay a wake-up time penalty). The next revision ought to support 32GB of LPDDR4, which should be a nice improvement.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They never were a computer company (atleast not since their "rebirth").
They're a fashion company and they failed to make enough changes to remain fashionable.
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So make an actual "Pro" model that offers more RAM and better graphics and has a bigger battery as a result. Believe it or not most users who want those things value them more than thinness and lightness at this point. Apples devices are plenty thin and plenty light right now! Nobody cares if it weighs an extra pound or two if it actually has the features people want. Leave the thinner, lighter, unreapairable lineup as the consumer lineup and offer a thicker, heavier, repairable and upgradable lineup for "Pro" users. That's what people want.
I think when Steve Jobs was still alive, he enforced a philosophy at Apple that the Mac was the "cornerstone" of the company, no matter what else it developed. It was all about that "halo effect", where the Mac was the control center for everything else, and everything had a symbiotic relationship with everything else Apple sold. (EG. You could be a Windows user and buy an iPod as your music player, and use it just fine. BUT, you'd eventually say, "Hey... Apple's iTunes software that manages this thing really runs better on the Mac than it does in Windows. Maybe I'll just go with a Mac in the future and use it with this?" Or you might be a Windows or even Linux user who bought an Apple Airport Extreme as your wi-fi router because it got high reviews. You *could* manage it with the Windows version of the management software, but you'd find it's easier to just set one up from an iPhone, where support is built right in.)
Back then, it was commonplace for Jobs to remind people that low overall percentages of Mac sales compared to Windows didn't concern him. It was about selling gourmet food vs. McDonalds. If you have a premium product, you concentrate on catering to those who appreciate that ... not worrying about maximizing sales numbers.
Today, it's very different. Apple under Tim Cook seems to believe iOS devices are the "future" as the traditional computer dies out, and MANY of the complaints Mac users have are direct results of this change in course. There are problems right now with PDFKit in OS X, where Apple suddenly rewrote the thing from the ground up in OS X Sierra without so much as informing developers. The reason? They wanted one with feature parity with the iOS version. This made Apple's own Preview software unsafe to use to edit PDF documents, because it causes embedded OCR layers to be stripped from them when you save them. Other applications like Mariner Paperless, which use Preview to display scanned documents in their database, crash as soon as you try to view a file in your collection. It's basically a trainwreck right now. I hear Apple is scrambling to fix a lot of this in the latest OS X beta, but this fiasco already caused many realtors to switch back to Windows because they rely so heavily on PDF as part of their daily workflow,
If rumors I've heard can be believed, Apple doesn't even have much of a Mac OS X development team left anymore. The updates to it are supposedly being done by a team that's expected to spend part of their time doing iOS related work.
I've been a big Mac proponent since the 2001 time-frame, but I'm finally reaching the point where my next computer won't be a Mac, unless there's a major change of course in the near future. As others have said, Apple has nothing for sale that I'd really want to buy. The new Macbook Pro 15" looks desirable at first glance. The touch-bar is a nice addition and it looks attractive in space gray color and all that. But in reality, it's the most expensive laptop Apple has ever sold (in a high spec configuration at least), while demanding more compromises to use it than have ever been expected of "Pro" users before. The lack of all ports except USB-C would be more acceptable if the USB-C standard was more prevalent. But putting it there today is doing it just to prove you're "cutting edge", while hampering real-world usage. And at that price? Why isn't a set of the dongle adapters included with it?? The Mag-Safe charging was a mistake to eliminate too. That's been a signature feature that made Mac laptops a step ahead of everyone else. Couldn't they at least do a USB-C variant of Mag-Safe?
I'm worried that in personal computing today, and I'm including professional PCs in this, everything seems to be a shadow of its former self.
Windows has been getting worse since 7. Windows 10 offers only modest benefits for most users over what we had back in 2010, and at a heavy price.
Apple seems to have gone full-fashion-gadget, with ever less flexibility and longevity across just about its entire product range.
Linux has the kinds of problems you mentioned, and much of the Linux world is still as focused as ever on the OS itself and not on what you can (or can't) do with it.
I'm starting to think the era around 2010 was the golden age of personal computing, and since then the greed of hardware companies, software companies and (especially) online services is just making almost everything worse for users.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They never were a computer company (atleast not since their "rebirth").
They're a fashion company and they failed to make enough changes to remain fashionable.
Do you really believe that, or are you just regurgitating hater credo? Woz and Jobs fucking CREATED the individual computer movement. Microsoft created Word for Mac, not for DOS. Jesus, learn your history.
Really? So the Commodore Pet (1977) doesn't count as a personal computer? Also, there was this thing called Wordperfect (1980) that came before Word (1983)... The only reason why Microsoft developed for the Mac first is that they saw a market where WordPerfect didn't have a foothold (i.e. ease of entry).
If you think that Woz and Jobs created the personal computer then you are seriously misinformed. There were a large number of other computer designs being developed and the Apple was no where near the most popular or most advanced.
I think that you need to read a few more history books yourself.
No, they claimed the *market share* of the *OS* declined, not the *use* of the *HW platform*.
While I'm guessing their overall use of the HW platform may have declined - anecdotally a LOT of people I know switched to Macbook Pros over the past ~5 years (myself included), but who feel the latest MBP was utterly underwhelming (myself included) - the study measured OS market share. Market share can go down even when overall usage goes *up*, of course.
I use OSX/MacOS, Windows 10, and Linux on my MBP. Honestly I mostly use MacOS because it's the native OS on the hardware - for work I mostly use Linux, with some Windows 10. And with the latest Windows 10 and the excellent Parallels integration, I've found myself using it more and more on my MBP as well.
There isn't a lot tying me (or as I said, anecdotally a dozen friends or coworkers I have discussed the latest MBP with) to Apple laptops other than their hardware kicked ass over competitors in the last 5 years... since that's not really true any more, I wouldn't be surprised if power/tech users start switching to Windows laptops...
Omitting the fucking ESC key for one. Requiring expensive adaptors to connect pretty much anything is another. Or how about the fact that after 4 years it's barely faster in many benchmarks, or that they utterly rape you if you want to opt to increase the non-upgradable-flash-SSD-storage. Or that their touted battery life increases have not only not been borne out in practice, but people are having issues with the battery lasting 1/2 as long as before. Or that after all of that lack of innovation, they haven't even made it cheaper.
I have a 2012 MBP, and there wasn't any serious competition to it back then (even as a Windows laptop using Parallels). But after 4 years this is all they could do, and not even drop the price? It's a joke!
Windows has always...*always* benefitted from these kinds of stats due to the fact that most desktops in the US government run Windows.
It's our taxpayer dollars at work!
Apple's products are better than ever...*except* for the ridiculous port nonsense.
Windows is still garbage spy/ad-ware...it's worse than ever.
Neither are right, but Apple's products are still way better for the end user of any level.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yes, I don't know if it's Tim Cock, Phil Schiller or Johny Ive to blame, but due to recent years total ignorance towards the mac, I finally switched from Mac to PC (Linux) for the first time since 1993.
The design aspect has gone totally to their head, the macbook pro used to be not only good looking, but on of the best portables on the market, the recent incarnation is a overpriced joke.
The mac desktops used to be good albeit quite expensive, it's just crap today. Either you got the mac pro which is outdated and non expandable or you have their "laptops in a desktop casing" offers like the imac or macmini.
It's really a shame as Mac OS X sorry, macOS is still a good system, but the lack of good hardware to run it on makes the decision easy.
Perhaps the Apple board wakes up an realizes they have people inside that is ruining Apples computer business before it's too late, the cellphone business may be blooming right now but personally I lost interest in the "latest" and "greatest" smartphone several years ago, smart watches never caught my attention and while tables have their uses they won't replace the desktop regardless what Apple thinks considering the iPad Pro, Microsoft been trying the same thing for years with the surface- but their offer at least can be used as a computer, the ipad is just an exaggerated iphone and once you run out of options on App store it's a paperweight.
The PET shipped a few hundred units by the end of '77 after launching in October. The Apple II shipped in June, and had sold twice as many by the end of the year, and by the early 80's had destroyed the PET's market share and basically matched the TRS-80 (of course at a much higher cost and profit margin for Apple).
The PET's only claim is that they announced and demo'ed it a couple months before the Apple II. But as anyone in the tech industry knows, demos are a dime a dozen, shipping (and shipping big) is what matters. And regardless of sales or launch date, the OP said "created the individual computer *movement*" - and I think few would argue Apple hasn't been master marketers (even when their hardware has been seriously lacking and poor selling) from the start.
And as far as killer productivity apps, who cares about Wordperfect or Word - Visicalc for the Apple II was basically what won the 1st gen PC war for Apple...
I have 2TB SSD storage inside my MBP 17" and am fighting the temptation to back one of them to a spinner go to 3TB—mainly because I don't want to invest in installing more parts in a seven-year-old machine and can't stand the slowness of spinning hard drives.
When I'm in my home office, I am regularly plugged in to all three USB ports (and one of them leads straight to an 18-port USB hub that has about half the ports full at any time).
You can't even carry 3TB with you on a current MBP, under any circumstances, not to mention that you are severely overcharged for the storage that you do buy. And while I realize that it's still possible to use the USB peripherals, the thought of *more* cord spaghetti in adapter form is not appealing to me, and neither is the much more fragile set of smaller connectors anchoring so many devices. I am very suspicious that I would see the effects of the tiny-connector robustness in my uptimes or data integrity.
And I already use one external monitor in addition to my 17" screen, and I'm equally hesitant to investigate solutions that would push me to sit a second external monitor on my desktop and try to drive it, etc. but at my at 13" and 15" are just too small for comfort, to use all those pixels for what I need to use them for.
Maybe I'm an edge case. Maybe I'm "picky" as some people hint. But the fact is that "Pro" designations aren't just about specs, they're about flexibility and the long tail of different kinds of productivity that "professionals" engage in. Pro gear isn't sleek and elegant. Pro gear is powerful and above all flexible with high longevity so that investments can be amortized.
So the fact is that even if Apple added the USB ports back in, if that's all they did, I wouldn't be all that excited. It's just a different mindset and strategy at Apple than it used to be, big picture.
However, if they released tomorrow a 17" or 19" clamshell that had multiple internal SATA bays, RAM to 32 or 64GB, multiple full-sized USB ports along with an SAS port, and a renewed their commitment to some of their "professional" application lines, I'd pay $5-$10k for it happily.
They won't sell me one. That's their business decision to make, but then they're stuck worrying when a lot of people like me (and I'm far from the only one, in my circles there are a lot of people asking everyone to share what they buy next) go where they can get the work tools that they prefer, whether you call that a want or a need.
I just don't have the time or the inclination to fuck around with the current MBP products. I see a million roadblocks and stumbling points that I just don't want to deal with. I have other things to do.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The only way Apple is going to get an increase in Mac OS X mindshare is to release it for generic PC hardware. At this point, pushing out old hardware as a new product just isn't cutting it.
iPhone, check.
MBP, check.
iPad, check.
iPod Touch, check.
Time Capsule, check.
The Time Capsule's functionality hasn't really been added to. Yes, Apple does update the firmware every so often, but fundamentally, the device hasn't seen any fundamental improvements. Even an el cheapo 1 drive NAS like a Synology DS115 gets significant new stuff every so often. The "old" Apple would have had a Time Capsule automatically copy data to a cloud provider (be it iCloud or another), and if a Mac needed a restore, it would first try to hit the TC, then would redirect to where the cloud data is stored. Apple could make some money in selling multi-drive Time Capsules with built in RAID and the ability to back themselves up to the cloud (client-side encrypted, with a Secure Enclave built into the NAS) for peace of mind. People would pay a premium for a dual-drive TC with RAID 1, a good filesystem, encryption, backups to iCloud, and the ability to install a new Mac from the LAN. However, Apple seems uninterested in this market segment.
The MBP? A Dell XPS 13 is a better MBP than a 2016 13" MBP on the hardware front. The software front, it is obvious that macOS has the hind teat when it comes to improvements. Windows is winding up ahead of macOS just because Apple hasn't done anything to keep it going. While Apple might offer one or two new doodads, Microsoft adds functionality almost anywhere. The WSL is a nice thing, for example. Plus, Microsoft keeps upping its game on security. The Edge browser is supposedly going to be placed in its own Hyper-V VM, completely separating it from the OS. On the virtualization front, W10 comes with Hyper-V, while Apple has absolutely nada for this. The most significant thing in macOS is APFS... but that is mainly so iOS has better encryption, as opposed to be something designed for Macs only.
I would hate to have a desktop Mac. The Mac Mini hasn't been touched in years, and the last refresh was a four core to two core downgrade. The Mac Pro, Apple's flagship machine? Will it be five years before it sees a refresh? For a flagship machine, Apple should rebrand the canister Mac Pro as a high end desktop box, and make a true E-7 Xeon Mac Pro in the traditional tower case with closed loop water cooling.
The iPod Touch gets some items, every so often. Because of that, it does work well as an emergency authentication device, because apps work on it, although the platform is definitely not as popular as it used to be. However, with some work, it isn't dead yet. Apple could pitch it as a method of recovering access to websites and such should one lose their phone, especially with 2FA protected by a Secure Enclave chip.
The iPhone and the iPad are the only two items that are "blessed" by Apple, and it is pretty obvious that they have this status. They are the only devices that get significant new functionality every year, and have a constant refresh cycle.