Jason Kottke posits that Apple’s apparent focus on long-term relevance is a healthier goal than growth itself because it drives the best kinds of growth: profit margin, brand value, and market leadership. Market share, while important, should not be put ahead of the other three:

What’s the best way to avoid becoming a monopoly? Make sure you never get close to 100% market share. What’s the best way to temper your market share? Keep prices a bit higher than you could. Keep supply a bit lower than you could. Keep investing in high margin differentiation and not low margin ubiquity…

They are fighting hard right now to make sure they are one of the two or three that will continue to be relevant in 5-10 years, but their goal is clearly not to be at 100% or even 90%…It’s scary to people because they remember the harm other companies have done when they reached monopoly status.