I think we're a clone now

[amiadudeorwat]

It's hard to say that was really what nearly killed them.  The rapid hardware improvement of the Wintel PCs of the era and the early 90's recession were both contributing to Apple's poor performance in that era.  When generic PCs were a fraction of the cost of Macs during a recession and had superior performance not to mention a rapidly increasing marketshare, which lead to further price drops on the PC side.

[amiadudeorwat]

What it shows is they specifically didn't grow their marketshare with the clone program and thus the clones just competed with Apple built Macs.  

But today it's different, Apple is a cell phone company that has a tiny little computer business attached.  Even if it starts to lose money they can keep it on as a development platform.  Want the the SDK for IPhone 11, just buy our 2019 Mac Mini for $1500 which has a low end CPU+4GB of RAM and embedded graphics and 1 Thunderbolt port, don't forget to buy hubs and adapters if you need trivial legacy devices like mice and keyboards!

[amiadudeorwat]

A bit of an exaggeration there, dontcha think?

$499 Mac mini

It was an exaggeration of a possible future where for some reason Apple had to justify continuing their computer line, see the bit about a lock in with developing Iphone, so it was jokeaggeration.  But a dual core 1.4GHz in 2018 is really slow.  But surely you can just pop open the case and replace it with a faster one right?

The point is the are a phone company that makes ridiculous amounts of money.  If they want to continue their computer business as a vanity project, they will.