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Developers Expect iOS and MacOS To Merge
AHuxley noticed the frightening little Ars story talking about a certain expectation that
iOS and MacOS will merge, leading to a single DRM-locked OS on your MacBook and your iPad. Certainly Apple would love a piece of every app sold. Now I'm sure that this has been discussed over there, but I wouldn't expect it any time soon.
If I were Apple I'd make a desktop iOS a user option like the current Parental Controls. Locking specific users into a walled garden of uncomplicated settings and apps sure would be nice for grandparent support.
I'd bet that half of the people reading this Slashdot story are mostly concerned about one feature: the ability to use Xcode and distribute what you make without starting a company and paying $99 per year to Apple. If Mac OS X loses this, watch GNUstep (Free clone of Cocoa's predecessor) suddenly attract a boost in activity.
The article discusses how developers expect iOS and OS X to merge from an API perspective - cross pollination between the developments (mostly from iOS to OS X) will lead to a unified development environment. This is *not* the same as the DRM/App Store, which is just the distribution method chosen for the iPhone and iPad. There's nothing technical about this - it's a business choice to make this the sole channel, one that doesn't seem to make sense for desktop computing, and one that I doubt they'd pursue.
Whilst I expect an App Store on the Mac, I would be shocked if it were the only distribution method available. In truth, I suspect we'll see a situation similar to downloading apps via Safari now - the first run, you get a warning about possible unsafe code, you tell it you're fine with that, and then everything carries on as normal. The Mac still represents a vast chunk of their revenue - only marginally less than iPhone in terms of income, and probably more in terms of profit. They're not going to kill a fully functioning golden goose, though I do expect some experimentation with it.
This experimentation is long overdue. For most people, something much simpler than a full desktop would be ideal - my iPad passes my parental approval filter far more than their desktop computer, the complexity of which causes more trouble than benefit. Now, the iPad is *not* a suitable desktop replacement - using my parents as an example again, there's no really useful document processing, no ability to hook up their TomTom, no easy printing. However, I can certainly see some hybrid iMac/iPad (or Android setup, I don't care who makes it) being a *much* better proposition for them than buying another desktop of the current ilk - be it Windows, Mac or Linux.
what will we develop mac applications on? Windows boxes?
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I remember when people were first speculating that the iPad might be locked down. A lot of Apple fans called that FUD too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The "walled garden" won't be the death of Apple. The alternative of a similar garden without walls will.
I doubt it.
Operating System Market Share
Windows 91%
Mac 5%
Linux 1.1%
iPhone 0.6%
iPod Touch 0.1%
iPad 0.1%
These are global stats, not US, remember.
Apple's "walled garden" - despite the price of admission - is well on its way to becoming a larger presence on the web than the Linux PC or mobile device.
Apple wants to kill the Mac OS desktop. Thus far I've been called a Troll, Naive and Insane. Now I am vindicated as developers have said the same thing.
Apple isn't going to kill the Imac and Macbook lines, they will simply replace the current NEXT based OS with the future versions of IOS and naturally more complex systems are more prone to unexpected issues. Moving the hardware to ARM is trivial as they've already got the HW expertise and OS to do it. The only thing they need to do is get SW makers to fall in line, MS will with their standard half-arsed attempt at Office:Mac and so will Adobe with CS (Adobe dont have the balls to tell Steve to stuff it). Realistically they just need to add more keyboard and mouse support to the Ipad.
Apple wants to do this for three reasons.
1. It just works(TM). Mac OSX can go wrong more then the Iphone. This is because, as fanboys point out OSX is a lot more complex then IOS. Apple does not want users to have to deal with their own problems so they seek to eliminate the chance of it happening. Apple's current strategy is to cut features out that don't work perfectly.
2. Homogeneity. Apple prides itself on the fact that everything works together, that choices are simple. Having two disparate OS lines is detrimental to the long term success of this goal.
3. Control. Fanboys may defend Apple's control for various reasons, mostly using cognitive dissonance (it's for your own good and other such excuses) but you cant deny that Apple wants control. They want to stop the hackintosh, they want to prevent more clones and they want to control what the end users experiences.
This wont happen overnight, not even the RDF turned to eleven could pull that one off. It will happen over time in baby steps and be hailed by the fanboys.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of a 192KHz sampling rate? The maximum frequency you can push through that is 96Khz, which is way above human hearing. In fact, the human hearing range is between 20Hz and 20KHz, so even 44KHz sampling rate should be more than enough. Or am I missing something important?
A lot of people don't really understand how to apply the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem and so they look at the "jaggy" sampled waveform and think that it will sound horrible if it is output. It's true that if you output the samples directly then you are going to hear artifacts but if you apply the Whittaker-Shannon interpolation formula then you get back the original waveforms and the output will sound nearly identical to the original.
Of course this is all best-case and since we live in the real world with imperfect low-pass filters and non-infinite past and future data we will still get artifacts if we sample at the minimum rate. That's (part of) the reason why we sample at 44.1 kHz instead of 40 kHz, to allow some overhead to account for these non-ideal factors. You absolutely do NOT need to sample at 192 kHz, if you do you are just wasting storage space on your digital media. I believe the default for a DAT is 48 kHz and that's pretty much the maximum you should ever use.
That is, unless you are doing recordings for bats and dogs to listen to...
Sapere aude!
Odd. There isn't a single mention of DRM in the entire article. The summary is just an alarmist piece. It's only natural that features from one end up in the other, just as features from Windows end up in Mobile, and I would expect features from Mobile will end up in Windows if they are useful in a desktop environment.
iOS4 received feature parity with OS X (some 23 features from OS X ported to iOS in addition to IPV6 and DNS functionality). The article fails to mention any of this. It only talks about iOS4 influence on the desktop while ignoring the return path.
As a Mac user. I'm not concerned in the slightest.
Believing any CEO's pronouncement is like believing a whore who tells you "you're the best".
You have to watch what Apple does, not what Jobs says.
You are welcome on my lawn.