“Apple’s intangible connection to the creators of the digital age—the developers, the engineers, the artists—has played a unsung role its dominance in the consumer space. Apple’s Mac computers are the chosen tool of the builders who have conceived, constructed and improved upon the web and mobile applications that have changed the world during the last 10 years,” Christopher Steiner writes for Forbes. “Not understanding this relationship between company and industry could lead some investors, summoning guidance from a spreadsheet and banal business school tactics, to declare that Apple should kill off the Mac.”

“As long as engineers use laptops and computers to build, then Apple should produce them,” Steiner writes. “Co-opting nearly the entire class of tech creatives as champion users, for Apple, is equivalent to Nike getting the best 50 players in the NBA to wear its sneakers for free.”

“This connection that Apple has built with tech’s vanguard should be cherished and nurtured. Microsoft knows well that this link to the creators is worth many times the value of the hardware that they actually purchase,” Steiner writes. “That dominance in all devices, for Apple, begins with the machines on which most software for these devices is built. iPads, Apple Watches, iPhones, the coming Apple television product—these are all platforms whose software is created on Apple’s original product.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Macintosh is Apple’s wellspring from whence everything else blooms.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Sarah” and “Rainy Day” for the heads up.]

SEE ALSO:

What comes after the Mac? – June 16, 2015
Apple doesn’t need to ‘kill’ the Mac in order to replace it – June 15, 2015