chasm

It's also worth reminding Americans that the rest of the world is unaffected by this lawsuit, so the feature continues to work fine outside the US.

I feel terrible for US COPD sufferers like Hecalder who will have to keep their current Apple Watch functional for the foreseeable future, but this lawsuit will eventually get resolved -- and if that goes Apple's way as I expect it will, the functionality will be restored to all Apple Watches that have the feature currently disabled.

In the meantime, if you are in the US and still have the blood oxygen feature available, take good care of that Apple Watch until this gets resolved.

"Marketshare" is usually defined by the consumer market, so you'd be forgiven for thinking all this innovation on Apple's part hasn't "moved the needle" much on consumer sales. But that's because all computers are far more powerful than 90 percent of the consumer market requires.

You also may be missing that consumer computing is not largely done on smartphones/tablets/laptops, not the traditional home PC anymore. This is a huge shift over the last 20 years.

Where the move to the M-series helped Apple enormously is in increasing Mac/Apple marketshare in specialized areas like scientific work, video rendering, and other high-end uses. It also helps Apple keep its edge in smartphones/tablets by making the iPhone/iPad more responsive than any Android-based product I've tried.

This in turn benefits Apple, because specialized markets are where the profits are, and because the superior hardware engineering of Apple products in turn attracts leading hardware engineers to the company, who contribute significantly to further innovation. This has helped Apple keep up its profit margins while delivering industry-leading performance, which funds the research needed to achieve these remarkable improvements.

Not a lot of this is consumer-facing at present, but these high-end innovations do continue to grow the company and very incrementally increase its share of the "personal computer" market. Apple focuses on consumer product, and will always be a second-place runner behind Intel, but its certainly no longer considered a "niche" player in consumer electronics.

What's been more important for a lot of people, particularly diabetics, is that the Watch can work with invasive sensors like the Libre Freestyle under-arm blood sugar sensor. No more wearing a small computer on your hip, instead your Watch and iPhone can work to let you know if you're falling low or going too high. Miraculous for the people affected, and allows them to leave a far more normal life.

There's a reason why big-screen "smart" TVs are quite inexpensive these days, and that's because all those ads you see on the TVs home page and injected additional ads all around the interface -- not to mention a lot of data collection on what you watch -- is going back to the TV maker to sell to advertisers.

Apple, by contrast, collects aggregate data on app usage and the Apple TV+ service, but a) anonymizes it and b) doesn't sell it to advertisers. This vastly more private and secure TV viewing experience is why I won't use a "smart" TV's built-in interface.

So for almost any other Apple hardware beyond AirPods, you're not likely to get much spending by teens on other Apple products unless they are from a rich family, and/or a highly Apple-centric family.

Even in those families, teens are likely to go for a cheaper VR headset because a) more titles and b) the VR market isn't mature enough to warrant a $3,500 purchase unless you have a very specific need for specific software that runs on that platform.

It would be interesting to see what people in their early 20s -- the college years, and/or those who have full-time jobs -- go for. I suspect you'd see more interest in Macs (specifically the notebooks).

As for the showing of the Apple Music service, it's doing far better than I would have guessed it was against Spotify's relentless advertising blitz. Apple should counter this by pointing out that 2.5 times as much of your subscription money on average goes to pay the artists than it does on Spotify. That's a message that might penetrate.