But I do think that if they make it so that developers basically have to choose to either develop for Apple OSes only or for everything else, most are going to go with "everything else".
Has there been a point in history, basically past the Apple II, where this hasn't been the case though?
No, but that's why a lot of big companies want to hedge their bets by competing in a lot of markets. Apple seems to be in the process of slowly withdrawing from its original markets.
Edit: I couldn't see the quote, and didn't realize that you had only quoted that paragraph. Having industry standard APIs makes it a lot easier for developers to code something once and then release it on several platforms. At minimum, they reduce the amount of work to make it available for several platforms. Apple used to implicitly encourage that that, but now, they're going in the other direction and making it harder to do so.
Apple doesn't care about desktop gaming. Why should they? They don't have a respectable market share before this, so who cares. But as you said, this has a much bigger impact on content creators.
This news, combine with the hardware they are letting languish - the Mac Pro, the Mini, any type of upgradeable form factor, MBP with significant GPU - it makes me think they really do want to just leave all the entire professional market behind.
I guess it's never been a huge market for them in the first place, just a prominent one. And it's hard to argue with their marketing strategy - they are pretty much dominating
However, the tablet market seems to have peaked in 2014 and has been shrinking ever since then.
Meanwhile, iOS is a very distant second place to Android in smartphones, and it's been a long time since they even had 20% of that market by number of phones sold:
Cheap smartphones are almost exclusively Android, with Apple having a much higher percentage of the expensive phones, however. One also suspects that people who buy a $500 phone tend to spend more in an app store than people who buy a $200 phone.
So while Apple is still making a ton of money, it's far from guaranteed that that will continue to be the case. They're nowhere near as dominant in any major market as Windows has been in desktops and laptops for the last 25 years.
It's not hard to see how Apple's market position could collapse. People who are used to Android on a $200 phone and later have more money and buy a $500 phone are more likely to stick with Android than jump to iOS. People who are used to Android on a phone and later buy a tablet might again want to stick with Android rather than jump to iOS. It's much harder to see the reverse happening, as Apple simply doesn't offer any budget-friendly devices of any sort.
I'm not predicting the imminent demise of Apple. They might well maintain or expand their market share in their key markets for years to come, or come to dominate a new market that is tiny or non-existent today. But I do think that if they make it so that developers basically have to choose to either develop for Apple OSes only or for everything else, most are going to go with "everything else".
Kind of funny, I have always had an iphone, but have never spent a dime in the Apple store. The nice thing about the Apple store is they police it far better than Google does.
In the past 20 years (since Jobs' return in 97 really), Apple has been very clever in expanding infant markets. They don't necessarily invent the market, but they see key ways the market could be better served, and after their entry the market expands by several times. They have never had a lot of success breaking into a well established, existing market.
Their revenue today is mostly from the iPhone. That has only existed for 10 years... Jobs was pretty crafty at coming up with new markets, it remains to be seen if Cook can do the same thing, but they are positioned well, with enough R&D and capital resources, that they have a good bit of room for error now.
So sure, it's easy to see Apple's current markets dry up, but one thing Apple has been good at is evolving. I wouldn't count them out just because they seem to be alienating aftermarket GPUs, gamers, or heavy content creators. I don't agree with the removal of an open standard, but truth is, the only folks that seem to push open standards are the ones that don't have the clout to push their own standard. That, and Apple has a very long history of creating and supporting their own proprietary tech even when they didn't have the clout to push it.
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Edit: I couldn't see the quote, and didn't realize that you had only quoted that paragraph. Having industry standard APIs makes it a lot easier for developers to code something once and then release it on several platforms. At minimum, they reduce the amount of work to make it available for several platforms. Apple used to implicitly encourage that that, but now, they're going in the other direction and making it harder to do so.
Their revenue today is mostly from the iPhone. That has only existed for 10 years... Jobs was pretty crafty at coming up with new markets, it remains to be seen if Cook can do the same thing, but they are positioned well, with enough R&D and capital resources, that they have a good bit of room for error now.
So sure, it's easy to see Apple's current markets dry up, but one thing Apple has been good at is evolving. I wouldn't count them out just because they seem to be alienating aftermarket GPUs, gamers, or heavy content creators. I don't agree with the removal of an open standard, but truth is, the only folks that seem to push open standards are the ones that don't have the clout to push their own standard. That, and Apple has a very long history of creating and supporting their own proprietary tech even when they didn't have the clout to push it.