> it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it.
I agree, but history just proved that Apple does not care.
And let's be real: Photoshop is cross-platform, and lots of content creation software is cross platform (or a web app). There are many more content creators that use Windows than people here are aware of or want to acknowledge (on HN, sometimes you get the impression that Windows is a forgotten OS that nobody uses). Now, Apple is at a huge disadvantage for losing that market -- often you can only be a big player if you have enough users. Apple also is never known for putting apps on the web like Figma and doesn't appear to have plan to do so.
A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it.
In the end, they just kind of development native Mac OS software half-mindedly. Which is fine -- that's what they want to do.
Sure but what Keynote does is pretty niche.
On the other hand, Pages is nowhere near the capabilities of Word and still not a good layout program either.
Numbers is OK only if your spreadsheet needs are very basic and you mostly care about the presentation of it. Its performance is so bad that even Google sheet feels better (it's way more capable nowadays, in any case).
Apple have those things only to say they have them and pretend that they have "solutions" instead of having to rely on 3rd party.
But they are not really competitive outside of the most basic need and in my opinion their existence is not worth all that much in today's landscape where both Microsoft and Google basic offering are free.
I agree, but history just proved that Apple does not care.
And let's be real: Photoshop is cross-platform, and lots of content creation software is cross platform (or a web app). There are many more content creators that use Windows than people here are aware of or want to acknowledge (on HN, sometimes you get the impression that Windows is a forgotten OS that nobody uses). Now, Apple is at a huge disadvantage for losing that market -- often you can only be a big player if you have enough users. Apple also is never known for putting apps on the web like Figma and doesn't appear to have plan to do so.
A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it.
In the end, they just kind of development native Mac OS software half-mindedly. Which is fine -- that's what they want to do.