I'm addressing the argument that there is no point making more powerful Macs--presumably there is no good use for them as long as we have better cloud viewers. I'm not suggesting Apple get more into gaming, I'm using the situation with gaming as a demonstration there there exist sizable markets for which 1) MacOS is fine (maybe even best in some cases), 2) Apple's refusal to build these "pointless" more powerful Macs is the only cause of the problem, and 3) better iCloud service would not solve it for the next few years, but more powerful hardware would. (Whether they WANT to solve it or don't care about it enough to solve it is a different question.)

Therefore, there IS a point in building more powerful Macs: serving markets that are only unserved because the hardware isn't powerful enough.

Gaming isn't the point. My interest is in developer machines, but illustrating that more powerful hardware is NOT pointless is more easily done with the gaming market example.

However this developer label is too broad.

For those developers that only care about WWDC, and their main income is programming macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS applications, the only requirement is being fast enough to handle XCode.

For those scenarios most Macs are already quite good and these are the developers Apple wants to keep happy, not those that buy Macs as an UNIX with a pretty GUI.

Oh, right. We agree then.

Apple doesn't want to serve these markets. There will always be some people who can find a use for more power, but they aren't Apple's market. For one thing they usually care about price/performance, and Apple refuses to play that game.

This is the "toner-head" argument that Steve Jobs railed against as the reason that Xerox never successfully marketed a GUI based machine.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1orCiYdwyo

No, no no!!

The toner-head argument is basically that decisions are being made by sales and financial teams who don't understand what they are selling.

I'm making multiple arguments here, but none are the toner-head argument:

Argument 1: iOS is a better platform to move into gaming on.

Argument 2: The compromises needed to make Macs good gaming machines are completely different to the direction Apple thinks is good for the Mac.

Argument 3: Apple has never cared about gaming.

While Apple hasn't made gaming a priority on MacOS in a long time, the original Apple machines were the place a lot of very big titles got their start and it took Windows a long time to catch up with them in that department.

Really, this is a very long and complex discussion, but I just wanted to point out that Argument 3 was not really accurate.

> were the place a lot of very big titles got their start and it took Windows a long time to catch up with them in that department.

Other than Prince of Persian, I don't remember a single one.

Then again, in Portugal outside the university campus there were no Macs to be seen.

Yet we had Amigas, Ataris and PC everywhere.