I'd disagree that the article frames that Apple planned this.
But Apple did spend 10+ years pretending that the iPad was the computer of the future, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It also went through a long period where it actively under-invested in the Mac as it thought it could somehow migrate everyone onto iPads, despite protestations from most existing Mac users.
It also took 6 years, from the release of the first Apple silicon Mac, to actually realise that there is no reason that a Mac laptop needs to have a starting price of $999. In this period they had all of the hardware and components that could have easily made a cheaper low-end laptop Mac... as evidenced by the same hardware being sold a lot cheaper when they put it into an iPad.
So at least for the last 5 years, the failure of the iPad and the lack of a cheaper laptop Mac, has all been due to Apple's strategic missteps and biases.
To then release the MacBook Neo without those missteps being acknowledged is fine.
But it's been obvious to anyone with the slightest amount of insight that the iPad is not the future of computing. Apple should have also realised this and corrected course a lot sooner than March 2026.
I agree that it says that people are willing to pay more, more often, for a smartphone than they are willing to pay for laptop and desktop computers.
However, how you can then extend this to:
> The market has spoken and they love the locked down, walled garden approach.
The market hasn't been given the opportunity to choose a more open iPhone or a closed, locked-down iPhone.
When the market is presented with both options, at variable prices, we can then determine what, if any, people are willing to pay for one vs the other.
This is great news and hopefully makes SwiftUI more feasible as a long term cross-platform UI option.
What would be great is if Apple started working with and contributing to this toolset.
What would be even better is if Apple then open-sourced all (or at least some) of their SwiftUI implementations.
What would be amazing is the community can then takeover some of the issues in SwiftUI – especially on macOS – and help to make it more flexible, feature-rich and comparable to UI toolkits like AppKit.
A good, cross-platform, Swift-based UI toolkit would go a long way to ensuring increasing and enduring cross-platform Swift usage.
I was going to defend Xcode and say it's not that bad... but then I read the article and realised that I have just become so accustomed to these problems that I don't consciously realise the daily hellfire that I experience.
Even when you think you're immune to it, Stockholm syndrome is real.
A similar article I wrote on the 'Dark Side' of Apple Development, brings up many additional issues:
But Apple did spend 10+ years pretending that the iPad was the computer of the future, despite all evidence to the contrary.
It also went through a long period where it actively under-invested in the Mac as it thought it could somehow migrate everyone onto iPads, despite protestations from most existing Mac users.
It also took 6 years, from the release of the first Apple silicon Mac, to actually realise that there is no reason that a Mac laptop needs to have a starting price of $999. In this period they had all of the hardware and components that could have easily made a cheaper low-end laptop Mac... as evidenced by the same hardware being sold a lot cheaper when they put it into an iPad.
So at least for the last 5 years, the failure of the iPad and the lack of a cheaper laptop Mac, has all been due to Apple's strategic missteps and biases.
To then release the MacBook Neo without those missteps being acknowledged is fine.
But it's been obvious to anyone with the slightest amount of insight that the iPad is not the future of computing. Apple should have also realised this and corrected course a lot sooner than March 2026.