Charles Haddad in BusinessWeek writes that iPod is Apple’s future, and the numbers are hard to argue. In PCs, Apple has struggled to hold even 5% market share, but it owns (according to IDC via this article) over 50% of the portable music player market.
I bought my Mac because I think Apple is innovating along the vectors that matter, at least to me: digital media, built around a UNIX style kernel, with the Internet as its core. Mac OS X gives the Mac its best chance in 10 years to recapture some market share, along with the fact that Internet apps (email, web, chat) are the core killer applications for PCs today (at home, anyway, Apple’s powerbase). But even if most people don’t switch to the Mac because the game’s been won, there will probably always be at least 5% of the market that chooses Apple out of philosophy, or amazing design, or sheer loyalty.
Even if the future of Apple is in digital media applicances (Sony?), the Mac will likely be the central “platform” from which Apple continues to innovate.