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.

Comments

Re:Not like I havent been saying this for a while

[Kitkoan]

Control. Fanboys may defend Apple's control for various reasons, mostly using cognitive dissonance

FYI, when you get called a troll, it's for bullshit like this.

You feel that? Thats called irony. When the biggest Mac troll on slashdot tries to call someone a troll for bullshit. Now the next time you want to call someone a troll you need to take a good, long look in the mirror first.

They want to stop the hackintosh, they want to prevent more clones and they want to control what the end users experiences.

As for "controlling what the end user experiences". That's overstating things quite much. They don't want to control what the user experiences, with the fundamental exception that they want to exclude a set of very rational things. Primarily, buggy software, spyware, and ports which fail to make good use of the platform. They don't want control over my experience other than to help see to it that I don't have to deal with such crap. And when us "fanboys" say (as you said in your post) "it's for your own good and other such excuses", what we're saying is that "it makes the product better". That's why we willingly choose Apple products, so we don't have to deal with a bunch of crap. It's also a huge part of why Apple products do so well even when surrounded by competition whose primary advantage is less "control".

As for Mac and control, it's always been about control. Control over hardware and software. This is why its products like the iPod/iTouch/iPhone are encrypted, for control. People found they could start to alter the software on these devices like either use different software to load music on to these devices (like Amarok could before they encrypted the hardware) or even install their own firmware on the devices these people paid for and are normally under the idea (like anything else they buy) that they can do with it as they can. Apple saw that people were doing what they wanted with something they bought (that just happened to have the Apple logo) and they shit a brick. Now all of these devices are encrypted on the hardware level. It wasn't 'for your protection' as it was only being used by a very small minority.

And as for your claim that by being locked down it 'makes a product better', how? iPhones still crash (done it myself as have my friends), it's lock down nature hasn't help it's security, and all of it's 'attempts to make it a better product' by judging if an app should be allow has resulted in either plain old censorship to all out privacy issues from something 'approved'. This hasn't been able to make 'a better product' even after 3 years, and the issues are just growing. Restrictions like this have been tried before by different peoples of power through out history and every time its shown to be a bad thing for the same reason: when someone has power they are more then interested in using/abusing it. And no, Steve Job's isn't going to be the first person in the entire history of humanity to not succumb to the temptation.

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.

It (although not the "it" you've been going on about) will be hailed because it will make our lives better. The "it" won't be locking down the Mac, or replacing Mac OS X with iOS, but "it" will be things like abstracting the filesystem