"it wasn’t hard to envision a future Apple that (A) didn’t sell Macs and (B) was at least as successful as Apple circa 2010."<p>I think that's exactly wrong. Macs are already the trucks in his earlier analogy. Apple only sells 5% of computers, but they're the highest-priced 5%, so they make an outsized portion of the market's revenues on them.<p>The iPad doesn't disrupt high-end notebooks and desktops one bit. It disrupts the low-end, the $600 Dell and HPs that make up the bulk of sales by volume (but which are really little more than loss leaders for the manufacturers).<p>Even if tablets get to, say, 75% of the market, it will mostly disrupt cheap PCs. If most of those tablets are iPads (debatable, but certainly not impossible) Apple will make a hell of a lot of money.<p>Apple would seem to think this way as well. Otherwise they wouldn't introduce a $500 product that disrupted their $2,000 products, especially when they think that nobody else will make a compelling tablet if they don't.