Can Apple see a time when they no longer produce the Mac?

Ars Technica published this article the other day which says how Apple are not awarding Mac applications the Apple Design Award this year and are instead focusing on the iPhone and the iPad.

It’s true that Apple have been pumping out some great mobile devices since 2007, but each year at WWDC we see more and more iPhone and iPhone OS stuff than we do Mac hardware and OS X development. Since the iPhone launched back in 2007 we’ve had two revisions of OS X in the form of Leopard and Snow Leopard (while there has been three (almost four) releases of the iPhone OS), and these have been treated somewhat like an afterthought to the big iPhone/iPod Touch news.

Even in the Mac hardware we’ve seen Apple take a very mobile attitude since the turn of the century. Look at TV, you’ll see MacBook Pros and PowerBooks and TiBooks all over the place. All the while the iMac has really taken over as Apple’s main desktop system, even that came with a handle when it was first introduced in 1998 and now the iMac is so slim that it’s very portable in itself (OK fine, you couldn’t sling it in your rucksack, but slinging it in the car is a hell of a lot easier than slinging a Mac Pro in the car!).

In January Apple announced the iPad, and in less than 60 days it has sold 2,000,000 of them!

I’ve just been watching some of the videos from the D8 conference and Steve Jobs was asked this questions by Walt Mossberg:

“Is the tablet going to eventually replace the PC?” This was Steve’s reply: “PC’s are going to be like trucks, they’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of X people. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy, people from the PC world like you and me, it’s going to make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long way, it’s brilliant. And we like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, I think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. And because it’s change, and a** lot of vested interests are going to change** and it’s going different.” Check out the video here, the question pops up around 3:53

So, Steve at least can see a time when the PC is going to be less important. He is reluctant to give an estimation, but could we see Apple starting to roll the ball now?

With the increased attention on Apple’s mobile devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, increased portability of the Mac platform, the mobile hardware, and dropping the Apple Design Awards for Mac applications, I think Apple are stating their position for the future: Computing is going mobile, and we’re here to lead it.