Dan Moren, writing for Macworld:

The Mac’s success is especially heartening for someone like me, who grew up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when the platform was a target for jeers and the company seemed to perpetually appear with that good old “beleaguered” adjective in every news story. No matter how much we asserted the merits of the Mac, we were told that it was nothing more than a niche product, okay for creative use, but not sufficient for real work.

Twenty-some years later, and the worm has certainly turned. As Tim Cook is fond of reminding us on every quarterly conference call, the Mac routinely experiences growth despite the contraction of the overall PC market. 10 years ago, Apple was selling 3 or 4 million Macs in a year. In 2015, it topped 20 million. While it may be only a small chunk of the company’s overall revenue, the Mac has maintained an upward trend for the last decade.

Obviously, much of the Mac’s success is due to the success of surrounding products, such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. That’s certainly true.

But the Mac is (still) the hub at the center of the wheel of Apple products, the dashboard at the heart of Apple’s ecosystem. At the same time, as Apple’s star was rising, Google’s free applications suite loosened the stranglehold long held by Microsoft’s Office suite. And that paved the way for the Mac’s acceptability in the button down business world.

Will the iPad slowly replace the Mac, becoming the new hub? Not seeing it, at least not yet. I use my Mac and iPad equally. But my Mac is still the control center of my Apple ecosystem and I’m just fine with that.