What you are missing here, is that my original post was about the fact that for the most part the desktop is dying. It is becoming more and more of a niche product. The sales numbers prove that.
What you are missing is the ability to actually interpret those numbers. These numbers are for the major part about
CONSUMERS and not companies (Apple and most other companies mainly manufacture for consumers). Which makes your entire point moot.
You seem to think that the data anymore is stored in the "working" building. No longer my friend.
You seem to think there are only fortune 500 companies and their only task is to work with digital data that is stored on a computer or some storage network. There is no such thing. There are more companies that are not fortune 500 than there are fortune 500 companies. There are also more companies working with analogue technologies or where a computer doesn't do much with data. Apple is aiming for the entire audience, not only for the Prada underwear wearing people in the audience!
For example there are companies such as Foxconn where they build computers. If their facility burns down they lose their production facility and thus can't produce. Moving to another site with their computers will not bring back the machines that make the components. Those machines are what allows them to do their core business, not the data and not the notebooks. This applies to ANY production company.
What about universities? They have quite a lot of labs and such. The University of Delft (TU Delft) in the Netherlands has had a building where a vending machine caused a short circuit. The entire building burned down. In that building they had a huge collection of rare chairs and other design items. The fire brigade rescued some of it, other parts were lost. Lots of people lost their project because it was an actual thing (the building housed the constructional engineering department for example) or plain paper. They didn't lose their digital data because it was housed on storage elsewhere on the campus. It took them a few days to get back with teaching because they had to put up tents for that. They were out of business for a certain amount of months yet they could take their notebooks elsewhere and work with the data in the datacentre. Why? Because an organisation consist of far more than computers and data.
How about hospitals, fire brigades, law enforcement, etc.? Same thing. A company or organisation does not exist of only digital data and computers. A company is much more than that. That's why it is not a matter of grabbing notebooks and going elsewhere. You clearly haven't dealt with these kind of situations. If you did you'd have known this! This is also basic economics.
Nope. Companies big and small are going portable. But instead of having you store data on your computer, you store it on the network. We all have laptops with "small" 128GB SSD's in them. Why? Because that isn't our primary storage. In fact the company does network sweeps regularly to make sure that we aren't storing a bunch of personal data.
Now go do field research in India or Africa where there is no network whatsoever and try accessing your data such as something simple and easy to access as e-mail. Try something similar in an underground car park, basement, etc. somewhere on site. Usually there will be no reception to the outside world so no e-mail, no vpn tunnel to the company in order to access data. That's why there are notebooks with ssd's for speed and a huge disk for storage.
Btw, the network sweep for personal data isn't allowed in many countries due to privacy laws. In order to see if it is personal or work related data you have to look into the data and that is a criminal offence in such countries. This is different in the UK and the USA where there simply isn't any privacy any more but those countries are not the only countries Apples aims it products at.
Heck we don't even have a developer anymore in our building that has a desktop. The only desktops to even be found are the guys who put together our promotional videos.
Quite a lot are still using a desktop because it is cheaper to buy. For (IT) management it doesn't really matter (you simply roll out the same installation) although notebooks are more prone to problems (obviously...because they get a lot more beating than a desktop sitting in a corner under a desk).
I would say that the Mac Pro forum is an insignificant number of people to be honest compared to overall sales. And many who have Mac Pros could be just as easily served by a Macbook Pro or Mac Mini. I'm in the process of replacing my Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro itself is a niche product as much as any other kind of workstation is. There are some professions that require such a beast of a machine, but many others that do not. Technology is also improving a lot. Where you used to use an MBA purely for text work you can now use it to game, virtualise, etc. The performance line between desktops, notebooks, all-in-ones, etc. is becoming thinner and thinner. This new Mac Pro clearly shows how far we can go with modern day technology. It used to be this really big case, it is now something tiny. Yet the tiny thing is more powerful than the really big cased computer. We'll see machines like this disappear in the future eventually but not now. Even though this is a niche product there still is enough demand for it. If there weren't, Apple would have killed it like they did with the Xserve.
I'll give you gaming as well, but frankly that's not a mac strong suit no matter what many will try to tell you.
It depends on what that person defines as gaming. If you want high end games than stick with an ordinary homebrew Windows pc.
