Video: What would it take for Apple to turn the Mac mini into a Mac mini Pro?
Over the past few days I've seen a lot of anger, bitterness, and rage directed towards Apple, especially on the subject of the Mac[1], and specifically the absence of new hardware[2] at the WWDC 2018 keynote.
See also: Will your Mac run macOS 10.14 Mojave?[3]
Let's put on one side for a moment the fact that WWDC 2018 is not the venue for hardware. WWDC is, as the name suggests, a developer conference (OK, you might be forgiven for overlooking this, especially given how during the keynote developers were expected to cheer at basic things like captions being added to the tvOS screensavers). Yes, Apple has used this venue to showcase new hardware, but when it does that there's equally forceful criticism from those who think hardware announcements take away from the developer focus, and turn the keynote into a gauche sales pitch.
But there's something a lot bigger and more fundamental that Mac users need to realize and absorb, and that's the fact that the Mac isn't a huge part of Apple's business.
Putting the Mac business into perspective, looking at Apple as a computer vendor[4], the company ships about five to six million Macs a quarter. Not bad, but it's vital to put this into a wider context. The figure is a little more than Asus or Acer can manage, but only about half that Dell pushes out in the same time period, and only a third of what Lenovo or HP manage to ship.
Compare this to the tens of millions of iPhones Apple sells