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

I welcome the

[_PimpDaddy7_]

iMerge(TM)

More like an option

[Gulthek]

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.

Re:More like an option

[dniq]

There is already a Simple Finder option in the current OSX, which only provides the very basic functionality to the user. My mom is using - and loving - it. No chance to break stuff, and incredibly easy for her to use.

Re:More like an option

[delinear]

To say they don't make much from the App store is to completely ignore the fact that it's their main marketing tool now for all iDevices. Every advert is about what you can do with app X or Y with very little focus on the hardware.

Re:More like an option

[Gulthek]

Yeah, that's the "current Parental Controls". This would be an order of magnitude simpler. I know, because I setup my grandmother with a Mac and even Simple Finder was too much. Multitasking, settings, windows, etc. Ideally we'd be able to setup a iPad-like screen with big buttons that runs one application at a time with absolutely zero user configuration possible (email accounts and the like having been setup by the admin account).

Oh Please

[WrongSizeGlass]

If it's not one thing it's another. Apple is dying. Apple is dead. Apple can't recover. The iPod can't save Apple. The Mac can't come back. The iPhone can't save Apple. The 'walled garden' will be the death of Apple. The iPad's failure will kill Apple ... and now the MacOS & iOS are going to merge resulting in pushback, backlash and eventually Apple's demise.

These are different markets and different products. I can't rule out an "Apple appliance" that will serve as a desktop type of computer with iOS running on it ... phasing out MacOS over the next decade? maybe ... but merging the two? Not very likely.

Re:Oh Please

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of babble we've been hearing about Windows for over a decade here now. I swear even the smallest of issues and another retard is ranting that it's another nail in MS's coffin and that they'll be toppled any day now.

I swear if I listened to all the fanboi rumblings I would have given up on Windows, moved to Linux and after a few years of frustration from their lagging behind I would now own a Mac.

I can only imagine what the ravings would have been like had Slashdork been around during the Amiga years.

Re:Oh Please

[jimicus]

If you listened to all the fanboi rumblings, you'd have given up years ago and bought an abacus.

Re:Oh Please

[Lord Bitman]

The "walled garden" won't be the death of Apple. The alternative of a similar garden without walls will.

Re:Oh Please

[westlake]

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.

Re:Oh Please

[Junior J. Junior III]

Please, this talk of walled gardens and apples is only going to fuel Jobs's God complex. Let's come up with some other metaphors.

Re:Oh Please

[insertwackynamehere]

Yup, that's how people sell things

Oh wait no, this is Slashdot "MOMMY THEY CHEATED WITH MARKETING AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

Five years from now....

[Anonymous Coward]

... they won't even be selling Macs anymore. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, the big bucks are coming in elsewhere.

Remember, the name of the company no longer even contains the word "Computer."

Re:Five years from now....

[pmontra]

They'll keep selling Macs because it's the only platform you can use to write an i* app. You won't be able to write them on i*s because they are locked down devices by design and that doesn't play well with the needs of a developer.

Re:Five years from now....

[Bing Tsher E]

Why would they want to spin off the Apple brand name into a business they obviously don't know how to do, and have failed at with each previous attempt? That's called 'brand-name dilution' and it's looked down on in marketing circles.

There isn't 'Magic Apple Fairy Dust' that can be sprinkled on a new 'IT Division' that will make it successful. They're just not good at the enterprise biz and have finally figured it out.

At Ease

[tepples]

If I were Apple I'd make a desktop iOS a user option like the current Parental Controls.

Apple tried this before; it was called At Ease.

Re:At Ease

[Ephemeriis]

If I were Apple I'd make a desktop iOS a user option like the current Parental Controls.

Apple tried this before; it was called At Ease.

And it genuinely kicked ass at the time.

I had a Macintosh Performa 6300 that was being used as a shared family computer back then. At Ease allowed me to set up a relatively safe and secure way to share that computer with our kids, without giving them access to absolutely everything.

Re:At Ease

[Ephemeriis]

I could perhaps understand this if you had one computer at home that you use for ultra-important tasks, but I really can't think of anyone with this limitation.

At the time I had this Performa running At Ease, we owned exactly two computers. One was a Mac, and one was a PC. And the only reason we had the PC was because we'd found a working one at a garage sale. This was years ago, before everybody and their dog had a personal computer. At the time, it was unheard-of to have two computers in a household.

Anyone whose life or livelihood is that dependent on a working computer at home has one dedicated to this ultra-important task and one (or more) for the kids and others to screw around with - it isn't like kids that are likely to screw up your system are really going to need the latest and greatest hardware.

I'm not necessarily talking about IT professionals. Plenty of folks have just a single computer in the household. If that one computer gets hosed, they're all out of luck. It won't be life-threatening... But there'll be no email, facebook, whatever. And most folks aren't able to do their own repairs, so it'll take a trip to the shop to get it fixed. Definitely an inconvenience.

I never understood this point of view. Why wouldn't you want the system wide open and available for your kids to tinker with?

I've already mentioned that we had the two systems - one of which was an old Tandy PC.

The kids were restricted to only using the Mac (and At Ease) after they killed the PC. My son saw all these white papers on the C: drive that couldn't be opened with anything, so he deleted them to make room. All those white papers ended in things like .DLL and .SYS Had to reload the whole system from disk. Lots and lots of disks. Was not fun.

How are they going to learn anything if you keep them confined to this walled garden?

Most people aren't terribly concerned with their kids learning how to tinker with a computer. They have a computer that they use for Internet/email/facebook/whatever... And the kids may be allowed to use it... But they sure as hell don't want the kids taking the thing apart to see how it works.

What would it have been like for our generation if our Commodores or Apple IIs or whatnot didn't let us do anything but run those idiotic learning games that schools tried to force on us? I sure as hell wouldn't have developed an appreciation for or interest in computers while being confined to a few "permitted" applications with no access to the underpinnings of the system.

At school that is precisely what I had available. We were only allowed to run a few, specific programs. The computer lab was locked when not in use, and the disks were kept in another locked cabinet. You basically weren't allowed to have any fun.

At home, my mother had an Epson PC of some sort, running some flavor of DOS. I was not allowed to use it. That machine cost multiple thousands of dollars and was exclusively for her work. Nobody touched it but her.

When I decided I wanted to learn how computers worked myself, I saved up my money for the better part of a year and bought a used Mac SE/30 from a repair shop. I tinkered with that thing to my heart's content. Had all sorts of fun with Hypercard.

The point being - it is not unreasonable for the parent in the household not to want their children to destroy their computer. And if the kids are that curious, they can get their own computer to play with.

It's somewhat expected.

[mitchell_pgh]

I believe Sasser sums it up rather nicely: "I could see a gradual, slow merger between iOS and Mac OS X styles and approaches," he said. "It doesn't make sense for them to be developing two of everything, one good, one not as good--two calendars, two address books--it's got to merge somehow."

Apple should learn from Microsoft's mistake of trying to have two rather diverse platforms (Windows and Windows mobile). Granted, Microsoft seems to be moving in a better direction these days with their mobile platform, but they could have been much further along if they would have used this method.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[AdmiralXyz]

I'm going to be blunt about this: your comment is completely wrong. It makes perfect sense to have a separate operating system for desktops and mobile devices, because they're two completely different things. Trying to run an OS on one designed for the other leads to frustration and unusability. In fact, I think Windows Mobile failed because it wasn't enough of a mobile operating system: it had things like a desktop, the Start Menu, and full multitasking, which make perfect sense in a desktop operating environment and are a terrible idea on a mobile one.

iOS and Mac OS X already do share a lot of code already, but that's just code reuse - proper programming practice. They've got two totally different user interfaces and paradigms, each working best for its target device. Trying to run one on the other would be unusable, and say what you want about Steve Jobs, but it will be a cold day in hell before a product comes out of his company that can be described as "unusable". Such a merger is a horrible idea, there's no evidence it is ever going to take place, and this article is just so much FUD to get the Slashdot crowd ranting and raving about Apple's walled garden.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[M. Baranczak]

"It doesn't make sense for them to be developing two of everything, one good, one not as good--two calendars, two address books--it's got to merge somehow."

It doesn't make sense for Ford to be making both cars and trucks. It means they have to have at least two separate lines for most of the components. They should just merge the two concepts.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[Kjella]

I guess it depends on which parts you're talking about - a certain OS kernel that runs everything from mobile phones to supercomputers seems to get a lot of praise around here. Presentation can be a rather thin layer compared to everything below you can share.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[tverbeek]

"Microsoft seems to be moving in a better direction these days with their mobile platform"

You haven't been following very closely then, have you? It's a jumbled mess of mutually incompatible systems, all with the label "Windows" on it. They almost seem to be trying to emulate the diversity of Linux systems. Microsoft's mistake, however, isn't with having multiple OSes, but having multiple OSes that are all UI clones of each other (without the common code base) regardless of the platform.

Jobs and his lieutenants have talked at length about what a mistake it was to try to put desktop Windows (with extensions) on tablets. This is why the TabletPC platform has been such a snoozefest in the market: it's the wrong UI for the hardware. Apple could have released a MacBook Touch (a laptop with a touch screen or a slate, either running OS X) five years ago, but they knew it wouldn't work, so they didn't. The same story applies to Windows Mobile: wrong UI for the hardware. Same outcome: dismal sales for something with the Microsoft brand on it.

Clearly Apple believes that "iOSX everywhere" is the wrong approach. Adobe CS would make no sense on a phone or slate, and neither would Tap Tap Revenge make sense on a desktop or server. They put a whole lot of effort into developing a new OS for slates and phones, using the parts of OS X that fit that platform, and engineering new parts for the rest. They'd be fools to throw out the parts of OS X that still make all kinds of sense for the desktop or traditional laptop just to merge it with iOS, and I see no evidence that they're fools of that sort.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[ahankinson]

You mean like the Mach kernel that both the iOS and OS X share? Or the BSD-based Darwin subsystem? Or some of the Cocoa frameworks?

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[0100010001010011]

Virginia Tech's System X

I mean it's not like they broke into the top 10 or anything:
Ranking seventh in the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful computer systems, System X was built at a fifth of the cost of the second-least expensive system in the top 10.

Not only that, but every computer that ships with OS X has the ability to become part of an XGrid. All you have to do is enable a checkbox in the Sharing control panel and that's it. XCode will seek out other XGrid computers and use it to compile.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[0100010001010011]

Did you not even read System X's history on their website?

1) Computer technology improves. I don't think any computer that was in the top 10 in 2006 was in the top 10 in 2010.
2) When it was "last ranked", in 2006 it was #47. When it was built, in 2003, it was ranked #3. When it was rebuilt in 2004 with the current G5s, it was ranked #7 (which is what the Apple article is about).

FUD

[whisper_jeff]

If you're uncertain what FUD stands for, please re-read the summary. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

Re:FUD

[Chrisq]

If you're uncertain what FUD stands for, please re-read the summary. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

Or Female Urination Device..

Re:FUD

[elrous0]

I remember when people were first speculating that the iPad might be locked down. A lot of Apple fans called that FUD too.

Consumers are dumb!

[samsonov]

I think the mentality of most home users are that they want Apple to tell them what apps can run on their device(s). Let's hope the power users talk some sense into Apple. I for one don't like the idea of only being able to consume apps that are published via the App Store...

Deus Ex Macintosh

[Darric]

Will this be like when IcarOS and DaedalOS merged into HeliOS?

Xcode without the certificate tax?

[tepples]

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.

Re:Xcode without the certificate tax?

[betterunixthanunix]

"If Mac OS X loses this, watch GNUstep (Free clone of Cocoa's predecessor) suddenly attract a boost in activity."

A boost, perhaps, but nothing that would even register on Apple's radar.

Re:Xcode without the certificate tax?

[BitZtream]

Why would that happen? People who buy Macs can afford the $99/year, why would they buy a mac then subject themselves to a crappier dev library and documentation rather than just paying $100 for the real thing?

You gotta stop thinking like people who buy Apple devices are poor and trying to get everything they can for 'free'. Its not Linux. Mac people actually just pay for stuff.

Re:Xcode without the certificate tax?

[Spaseboy]

I guess maybe that's true if you're planning on releasing an app for free, which even that can be done with a profit on iOS thanks to iAd and other in-app ads. The iOS gold-rush has not even come close to seeing its peak, with a relatively low market penetration compared to other platforms.

I've used Slashdot since the 90's and there's always been this whole concept that shareware devs deserve to be paid. So now, basically all shareware-type apps on a platform are making mad money and people are screaming because apple rejects like, 2% or something?

If you have a good idea and you can program decently enough that your app won't crash in basically a single-tasking environment, buy a Mac, pay an extra $99 and get rich. Um, where's the downside? Because you're a 40 year old dev used to paying hundreds for other IDE's and making no money and now a 14 year old has made more in a few months than your lifetime earnings? Buck up.

Misleading summary

[adamwright]

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.

Re:Misleading summary

[betterunixthanunix]

"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."

Well hang on...why wouldn't the walled garden work for desktop applications? Users do not seem to mind it for the iPad, which is really a tablet computer (I am sure someone will disagree with me, since it is not "marketed" as one), nor do users seem to mind it for video game consoles, nor for a certain large web community. We are already hearing people saying that traditional desktops are for "serious work," not for "consumers."

So why not? Why not have Apple impose an "approval" process for Mac OS X desktop applications? I see no reason why Apple could not create a spectrum of computers -- iPads at one end, and high end workstations at the other, with various levels of application approval processes needed. In that world, you would have to pay thousands of dollars for a top of the line Power Mac workstation to be able to install "unauthorized" applications; a "consumer level" notebook would require an extra payment for "unlocking" to install those applications (or perhaps you would have to "upgrade" to another version of Mac OS); and an iPad would have no options for unapproved programs.

Re:Misleading summary

[Dog-Cow]

The (current) iPad does not have a GPS receiver.

Re:Misleading summary

[shutdown -p now]

Because deep down, those users are telling themselves, "It's ok that this thing sucks, it's just a mobile, it's 'not a personal computer' and I still have my personal computer for whenever I need more power and flexibility."

Previously you could say the same thing for iPhone vs other stuff - "it's just a cellphone, it's not really a computer". But now iPad came out, and it's "just a slate, not really a computer" - but notice how the dividing line has crept up.

This kind of division is entirely subjective, and, furthermore, easily manipulated - and Apple is really, really good at marketing. If they release a locked-down desktop and call it, say, "entertainment hub", I bet you'll see the same "not a computer" arguments applied to that. And users will buy it in droves, and will be quite happy with it, because it really does pretty much everything they need to do (or, at least, think that they need to do). So, again - why not?

And if they do that

[wiredog]

what will we develop mac applications on? Windows boxes?

Nothing to see here..

[Rytr23]

Simply garbage, which is not surprising considering the source. That is all.

Doesn't make sense to develop 2?

[cgenman]

"It doesn't make sense for them to be developing two of everything, one good, one not as good--two calendars, two address books--it's got to merge somehow."

I can't imagine how a calendar developed for a 2" touchscreen could have the same interface as a calendar developed for a 21" keyboard-and-mouse, and not have it be terrible. Similarly, a copy of Word on the iPhone and a copy of Word on a PC would necessarily need to have very different interfaces... You can't get hover tips on a touchscreen, people don't gesture with keyboards, mice aren't multitouch, and iPhone screens are tiny.

The idea that you can write one app and have it work on such disparate devices shows a fundamental lack of understanding of good design.

Apps will disappear

[kylant]

I believe that apps on mobile phones are a transitory phenomenon. They are/were necessary to make content available on the relatively small screens and to implement touch input (as most websites at the time were built for mouse input). The functionalities of most apps these days can be implemented as websites (HTML, Ajax, ...) and this will be the best solution to fix the compatibility problem (different apps for Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone 7 (?), Bada (?),...) and to avoid vendor lock-in. Will we really need an app to access news content? Will the NYT really build and maintain apps for 4 or more different platforms? I believe what we need are properly coded websites that adapt to different screen sizes and input devices.

There will probably be a market for high-end applications on your phone (navigation?, media player?) but honestly, how many of those are on your phone?

Re:Apps will disappear

[nyctopterus]

Nearly all the apps on my iPod touch are games. And no, you cannot currently do what they do this with HTML5 and Javascript (or, at least, they would be very slow to write and have terrible performance).

Oh, come on!

[salgiza]

The article is about how some of the APIs (UIKit, mainly) in iOS are probably going to be included in future versions of MacOSX, and suddenly the summary is about MacOSX becoming a big iPhone full of DRM! Slashdot: where not even the editors bother to read the articles! (Either that, or someone hates Apple too much...)

You can't code on iOS you fucktwits

[gig]

The main difference between Mac OS and iOS is you can't code on iOS. It's partly a security feature and partly an anti-complexity feature. iOS is for a non-coding approach to all tasks. You may not know this, but a Photoshop pro writes a ton of code. The home user working with their photos doesn't need to.

Another feature of iOS is no custom drivers. The USB audio interfaces that work with iOS are the "class compliant" ones that work with the system's universal driver. This provides stability and ease of use, but it limits the quality to consumer-quality 16/44 stereo. Audio pros still need a system to hook on an 8 channel 24/192 interface. OS X has a pro audio subsystem the likes of which you can't find anywhere else. Are we going to just abandon that and tell music producers to use toy Windows? The iPod app on iOS is filled up by people using Mac OS.

The mouse is going away, no doubt. But you will still have a consumer OS and a pro OS. Web developers need Apache and Ruby and PHP to make websites for iOS users, movie makers and graphic artists need to code workflows, and app developers need to code apps and Apple needs to code OS X itself. The idea that Mac OS can go away is just so fucking stupid and ignorant and disrespectful when you consider how much of our fucking culture is made on Macs.

Anyone who thinks there is no longer a need for Mac OS is an iPad user. Get an iPad ASAP and enjoy! STFU about Mac OS otherwise. You probably don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

   

Re:You can't code on iOS you fucktwits

[Graff]

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...

Re:You can't code on iOS you fucktwits

[Graff]

The 2 octaves overhead allows for subsequent processing, re-sampling, and pitch-shifting/time-stretching. Pitch-shifting 2 octaves down, for example, effectively converts a 192 kHz recording to 48 kHz; the extra bandwidth offers a sound designer flexibility.

No, it does not unless you are starting with frequencies ABOVE 20 kHz which would normally be inaudible to human ears.

If we are talking about sounds that a human can hear then you do not need the additional samples to shift the pitch down. Signals that are at 20 kHz and were captured at a sample rate of 40 kHz can be shifted down 2 octaves to 5 kHz without losing any quality since a 5 kHz signal would only need a sample rate of 10 kHz. It doesn't matter that your signal is effectively 10 kHz, that downshifted signal is 5 kHz and doesn't need a higher sample rate.

If, instead, you are pitch-shifting upward you don't want to go over 20 kHz anyways because no one could hear it! The maximum sample rate you need for anything that humans are going to listen to is 40 kHz. Yes, some overhead is nice because you will lose some resolution when manipulating the data but 192 kHz is absolutely ridiculous, even 96 kHz is overkill.

If you really need these huge sampling rates then I'd take a good, hard look at your equipment because something is wrong with it. I'm an instrumental/analytical chemist and I work with signal theory constantly in building and tuning instruments. We never have to resort to over 9 times the sampling frequency of the signal we want to capture, 2 or 3 times gives extremely accurate results no matter how much post-processing we need to do.

Just to put this all in perspective the highest note on a standard piano is C8. It has a frequency of 4,186 Hz (in 12 tone equal temperament) which means that you need a sample rate of 8,372 Hz to capture it. If you sample at 40 kHz you will not only get its first harmonic but also the second, third, AND fourth harmonics - and nearly the fifth! The only reason we need to sample at a rate of 40 kHz in the first place is that transient sounds like cymbals, buzzes, hisses, and clicks often include higher harmonics in the 15 - 20 kHz range and if you don't capture those then you lose some of the character of the music. By sampling at a rate over 40 kHz we accurately capture those signals and preserve the original recording in such a way that humans can fully enjoy it.

Steve commented on this

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.macstories.net/news/steve-jobs-no-mac-app-store/

iOs layer in OSX

[fentagh]

I wouldn't mind it as a dashboard replacement.

Re:Probably not

[jo_ham]

They already share APIs - iOS is heavily based on OS X with a touch UI on top.

This article is just total FUD. It's the same sort of "analysis" as that story from a couple of months ago how Apple "will definitely" move to an App Store model for OS X. There's just no sense in it at all, given the direction that Apple are taking OS X.

They forked OS X, for want of a better term, and created iPhone OS (now iOS), and continued development on OS X itself. There is nothing to suggest they will merge the two again. Why suddenly cut out the creative suite, office, other third party pro apps, games, the new Steam client (finally games are becoming top tier)? There's just no compelling business reason to move to iOS on the desktop; and ultimately Apple are in this business to make money.

Re:Not going to happend, uses same OS's already

[am 2k]

If you'd read the article, you'd know that they were talking about merging UIKit into AppKit, not the OS as a whole (bad summary there, though).

A lot of stuff in UIKit is done the way it'd be done in AppKit were it created today. For example, in UIKit every view is automatically OpenGL-backed (via Core Animation). In AppKit, you have to enable that on a per-view basis, because it can cause problems (for example, WebViews always stay blank that way). Further, the Obj-C 32bit runtime on Mac OS X is the old one from the NeXTSTEP days. In 64bit and on iOS (which is 32bit), they're using a completely rewritten and not backwards-compatible one that allows many nice things like automatically generated instance variables, better exception handling and a few more things since iOS4 that are covered under their NDA (they're explained in the WWDC videos).

Not like I havent been saying this for a while now

[mjwx]

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.

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

[BrokenHalo]

Apple wants to kill the Mac OS desktop.

It might, but I would be curious to know whether there was any evidence for this beyond the reported opinion of a handful of third-party app developers. These guys are targeting their products towards Apple's little handheld media boxes (and good luck to them) but their opinion doesn't necessarily reflect reality.

Personally, I hope it doesn't. OS X is certainly not everything I would like it to be, but it is at least a unix-based platform that is useful for my purposes. I would be quite surprised if Apple were to actually dump OS X, given that maintenance and development of a "real" computer platform on established third-party chipsets must be a comparatively small drain on their resources by comparison with what they surely must devote to their phone and tablet devices.

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

[jbolden]

I don't think you are a troll just a bit unrealistic. There is a huge difference between what users expect from Cell phone OSes and what they expect from Computer OSes. In particular Computer OSes need to support custom applications easily.

Apple would lose their place in the IT market, the scientific market, the music market, the video market with a limited lockdown system. They would lose their margins with a high level of control and supervision for a highly capable system. Yes they would love to have the control and the homogeneity. So would Microsoft, so would Linux. Its just that the order on computers is:

a) features -- can do what I want
b) reliability -- does what I want consistently
c) price --
d) convenience -- does what I want easily.

For cell phones the order seems to be
a) basic features
b) form factor
c) other features

Re:Apple is dead, long live Apple!

[DrgnDancer]

He's not. He's saying that you have a choice: to buy or not buy an iDevice. He, like me, is tired of hearing "it's all about choice" from people who then turn around and say, "of course if you chose Apple you are an evil mutant fanboi hypocrite that I shall never, ever shut up about." My *choice* to buy an iPhone was just that. At the moment I'm happy with the *choice*, if that changes I can *choose* to go buy and Android phone. Therefore no *choices* have been taken away from me at all.

Flamebait in summary

[bonch]

leading to a single DRM-locked OS on your MacBook and your iPad.

There is zero evidence that any such convergence (beyond the fact they already share the same Darwin core and Foundation classes) would be "DRM-locked." You threw the phrase in there as flamebait to ignite discussion. Don't be an alarmist site.

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

[bonch]

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.

How does the speculation of a few developers vindicate you?

Steve Jobs himself has already addressed this topic and said traditional PCs won't go away. They'll be like trucks; the people who need them will simply be fewer than those who just drive regular cars.

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

[jbolden]

I'd say it was features first for Microsoft.

What Microsoft did for the office environment was offer the ability for departments within a company to roll their own software out. They didn't have to go to the mainframe people, and so departments switched from:

a) dumb terminals on the mainframe
b) Office computers using terminal emulation

Of course for small business and home personal computers offered some ability to get computers at all. All computers were unreliable in the 1980s. In the early 90s OS/2, Xenix and Unixes existed but generally didn't offer the application diversity (features).

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

[The End Of Days]

Your feelings of vindication are as valid as the vindication a christian feels when he points to the bible as "proof" of his beliefs.

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

[DJRumpy]

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.

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

[e4g4]

I'd recommend watching the interview with Jobs at D8 (by Mossberg and some other WSJ journalist), it's available (free) on iTunes. He made an excellent car analogy, equating the PC (as in personal computer, not PC/Mac) to trucks in the early days of the automobile market. Basically - the analogy was that back when automobiles were new, the vast majority of cars were trucks, designed for getting work done. As that technology trickled down into the popular market, the car became more user friendly (automatic transmissions, air conditioning, radio, etc.) and less like trucks. Jobs essentially equated MacOS and iOS with trucks and sedans. Ultimately, his point was that there are still trucks now (implying that Apple has no intention of killing their entry in the PC market). As I see it - Apple would love for MacOS marketshare to stay exactly where it is for the foreseeable future (5%) and replace the other 93ish% with iOS. Jobs is not a fool - he knows that we need trucks; I do not believe that Apple has any intention of killing MacOS.

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

[node 3]

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 doesn't want to kill the desktop, the desktop will be around for quite some time, and they want to be there until the end.

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.

iOS is Nextstep, just with (mainly) UIKit replacing AppKit (there are more differences between Mac OS X and iOS, but this is main difference in terms of its relation to Nextstep). As for replacing Mac OS X with iOS, this doesn't make any sense. iOS is designed for small multitouch screens. This notion of iOS on the desktop is just as misguided as the idea of an iPad running Mac OS X. It can be done, but it would make the product worse.

Having two disparate OS lines is detrimental to the long term success of this goal [homogeneity].

Perhaps, but the gain in homogeneity would not offset the loss in quality of the Mac platform.

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. Calling those who disagree with you "fanboys" makes you a troll, de facto. You may not realize it, leaving you to wonder "what the hell did I say that makes me a troll?" leading you to a conclusion that it must be just a bunch of "fanboys" who just don't want to hear the truth (hence your claim of cognitive dissonance), reinforcing your notion that we're just "fanboys", and therefore our arguments are dismissed out of hand.

Anyway, my point being, if you don't want to be seen as a troll, drop that word from your vocabulary completely, even when you think that there's a situation where it incontrovertibly applies.

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

And this is why you are wrong, whether you get called troll or not. The above, which is pretty much the extent of their "control" is fairly limited, and very weak grounds upon which to base any sort of grand notion that Apple wants to increase control over their users.

The "control" over the hackintosh is obviously very limited, and not the sort of control which leads to any sort of slippery slope issues. They want you to buy a Mac if you want to run Mac OS X. The Mac and their OS are a whole. You may not like that that's how they see it, and that that's how they go about it, but some sort of overarching "control" it is not.

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".

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 M

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

[PopeRatzo]

Steve Jobs himself has already addressed this topic and said traditional PCs won't go away.

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.

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

[PopeRatzo]

As a Mac user. I'm not concerned in the slightest.

Clearly.

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

[jacksonj04]

You mean the new Mac Minis they released last week?

I never understood this point of view.

[falconwolf]

Why wouldn't you want the system wide open and available for your kids to tinker with?

Because I, in the third person, only have one computer and I don't want it hosed. I, the real me, use my Mac for different things and have set up more than one user account so that working in one I will not hose the whole system. Among the things I use it for is development, financial planning, photography, and programming. Only one account has administrator privileges, and I only log into that one to install software, to run updates, or for maintenance.

Falcon

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

[jo_ham]

Too long didn't read, after your first paragraph pretty much defined what it was you were going to say.

Touched a nerve did he? Too close to the truth?