Across the 2010's, Macs were variously making up 35-80% of the entire PC industry's profit, according to different news sources in different years.
And since then, Apple's share of the PC market has only gone up, from ~13% to ~31% [1].
I can't find any solid data on profitability from the past couple of years, but there's no reason to think it's substantially changed.
So when you're the #1 most profitable computer manufacturer by far, it doesn't exactly sound like "losing" to me, even if you're not #1 in market share by OS.
At the end of the day, the only thing that actually matters is your total profitability in dollars. And there, it seems like Apple has won massively.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-da...
Did they? Last I checked they have the best consumer laptops on the planet.
So basically:
Apple lost the PC battle and won mobile,
Microsoft lost the mobile battle and (seemingly) is winning AI,
Google is losing the AI battle, but will win .... the Metaverse? Immersive VR? Robotics?
They have the power to crosslink this monetization to the success of people using the platform by just making it part of the algorithm. Pay to play (your videos to any audience) and in so doing, normalize that we pay for this stuff like it's cable. Their economies of scale mean their break-even point is way, way lower than it would be for anybody else.
Maybe it would be unethical to stifle people on your platform if they're not normalizing the consumption of your platform like it's a for-pay service instead of some magical free thing that comes from nowhere, but it really never was a magical free thing, and Google's ability to platform or stifle people is the most powerful force they could possibly call upon.
It's just that they're turning to an actual market now, rather than maintaining the pretense that it's all free and instead getting paid by… what, Russia? Prager U? What has changed in recent years to imply that getting paid by a booming, capitalist market might be more profitable than trying to get paid by malefactors?
I'm pretty sure Google owns media now. That's what they won. We've seen worse than what we're currently seeing as they try to fight adblock and get paid as a service. Remember what happened when everyone thought it was infinite media for free. Someone was still finding a motive to pay 'em, but hidden motives are a lot more worrying.
