Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal recommends that Apple should kill off the Mac brand. “I think that as Apple becomes ever more a maker of consumer gadgets rather than computers,” he writes, “Apple should stop making ‘trucks’ designed for heavy computational lifting, just as it exited the server market in 2010.”
He emphasizes that Apple should continue to offer its customers a “desktop-like or notebook-like experience.” But he doesn’t think the company needs the Mac platform to do that—the rumored forthcoming iPad Pro running iOS 9 could do that, he suggests.
Mims adds that with your data increasingly living in the cloud, all you need is a screen to act as a window through which you can see it.
In a separate column, Mims says that the best tech companies can be the best at two or three things—perhaps Apple should focus on the smartphone, the tablet, and wearable technology.
It’s an interesting concept, although of course the tablet segment is being squeezed between phones and laptops, as I noted in a post about Apple’s second-quarter results.
Meanwhile, if you are in the market for a Mac, Mims’s colleague Joanna Stern has some advice.
