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Apple Patent Points To iMac Touch Running OS X and iOS
siliconbits noted an interesting little tale of a recently surfaced Apple Patent covering an iMac Touch with a flex base that switches from iOS to OS X based on orientation. There's some interesting food for thought in there ... I can't decide if I like the idea or not.
This is what it has looked like for a long time. iOS is on their every other line of devices and the walled garden apps economy is a significant money maker for Apple. Combine that with the recent patent of remotely detecting and disabling jailbroken iPhones and I think Apple really wants to control the whole area, and obviously wants more and more money. Say goodbye to hobbyists or hackers, and just imagine if Microsoft did the same.
Apple trying to dumb down the computer and to vertically integrate the entire experience to lock everyone in will probably fail. Right about at the peak of Microsoft's power is when the company saw they had to support other technologies. IBM's peak in the mainframe age vanished when PC's came along and freed people from the tyranny of the mainframe.
i like my iphone and think it's the right experience for a mobile device, but not the computer.
By the time a patent becomes public the inventor has sent it in about three or more years prior. If we haven't already seen this, it isn't likely to happen soon. go to appleinsider and checkout all the "apple patent points to" things you've never seen. Obviously, they don't report on the patents that you have seen (who would read, "Apple patent points to phone with touch screen and accelerometer.") so it is a little hard to know the time to market versus time to patent delay, but I've never seen anything an "Apple patent points to".
Why? Apple got permission from Cisco to use the name.
Nothing in this patent application says they are getting rid of desktop OS X.
Nothing in this patent application says they're doing anything. It's a patent application, not a business plan.
Steve said...
Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.
If Steve thinks the desktop metaphor is too difficult for most users, he'll take it away from everyone. If he thinks only signed applications should be allowed to run on your computer, he'll make it so. Of course, Microsoft could do the same thing, but Apple is certainly more likely to make those decisions. I can only hope they will keep the "mouse option" for pro creative users, but with Apple randomly removing FireWire, ExpressCard slots, and still failing to provide professional level graphics cards, most people see the writing on the wall: average joe consumers along with iPods and iPads are the future. Steve is a smart guy, but I wouldn't put it past his ego to declare the end of computers as we know them.
OS X developers think the same thing.
Last week, we also hosted a live chat featuring several developers whose apps were picked for our Ars Design Awards for Mac OS X. We asked them what they thought about the future of Mac OS X and Apple's development platform during the chat, and then followed up on their thoughts about languages and APIs. While current Mac developers aren't nearly as concerned as our own John Siracusa about the Objective-C language in particular, they do see new and improved APIs coming down the pike. Developers are seeing iOS influencing Mac OS X instead of the other way around.
The developers on our panel unanimously agreed that Mac OS X will eventually be subsumed by iOS, but that the Mac has plenty of life left. "Mac is the awesome old grandma, whose kids (iPhone & iPad) have left home," Atebits' Loren Brichter said. "Not dead; not really dying. But it's our job to keep her comfortable until she's gone."
Apple and Andorid are reinventing the way we look at software, "Apps" to be specific. Who knows where it will really take us - sure desktop software is a different ballgame than mobile, but what are people using more of? Our main "Software" of use has been the web browser as of late (For a majority of people) as well as word processors. Beyond those, what percentage of people use 2-3 other desktop applications?
How many mobile apps do they use?
As someone that writes mobile apps, the process is frustrating. We are seeing a mass dumbing down of the already dumb consumer. Everyone now expects all software to cost $0.99 - be feature packed, and work flawlessly. As anyone that develops software knows, "pick two of those."
I'm a long-time linux user (since pre-1.0 Slackware), but have presentation needs that I personally prefer some software support for. Thus I use a presentation package --- PowerPoint typically. For a long time I would run linux on my laptop and dual-boot windows when I needed to do presentations. The nature of my work and personal preference requires the use of a Unix-based OS to get anything meaningful done.
I first migrated to the Mac when I noticed times had changed and they had built something I had always thought they should do every since they bought the NeXT properties --- tart it up to look sufficiently as they want it to, but leave the Unix underpinnings for the developer/power user crowd (NeXT was great for that --- all the Humanities people I knew that used it had no idea there was a terminal on the machine and loved it...the fact there was a terminal meant I loved it too =). With office available on the Mac, giddy-up - I get the machine I want without dual-booting. Great!
I've always had a worry in the back of my head that my happiness with Macs would be transient --- that as the platform regained traction they would start screwing with it in ways that are unfriendly to the unix crowd. So far, so good, but ever since the iPad I have been concerned they would push toward that being their OS rather than the full-blown OSX we have currently. I do understand the points people make about how developers need a development environment so the desktop OS won't be going anywhere, but that clearly isn't necessarily the case: no reason they can't build a suitable development environment for the more restricted OS, or simply leave it to developers to cross-compile. Bottom line is my utopian "main-stream unix-based OS that is friendly to the non-power user" may well be at risk.
So fine - it's their company, they'll do what they want and probably make oodles of money doing it. But it will ultimately push me back onto linux full-time, and I'll probably just suck it up and learn to live with PDF presentations or OpenOffice as I have no interest in going back to a dual-boot solution...I'm getting too old I guess :).
It will sadden me a little though as in spite of some of the vendor lock-in that Apple tries to encourage, I have been happy using their products and have built up a bit of an ecosystem I enjoy using. I realize I (we?) are not really the market they are concerned with dominating, but it's a shame they jettison the "win-win" product I feel they had in keeping both the unwashed masses and the developer/power user happy with what is available.
Maybe good for Linux longer-term though. We are light years from where we were a decade ago in terms of user-friendliness of the system. Maybe this can be a tipping point and we'll end up with a "win-win" free OS which would be very liberating for everyone involved =).
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~AC
I definitely thought Apple was going to make a combination touch screen iMac and Cisco router.
I wouldn't put a touch screen router beyond Apple, seeing as how Apple did popularize 802.11b with AirPort. Imagine a Time Capsule with a built-in iPad.
Isn't IOS based on OS X? Maybe it's not an either/or thing. Maybe it's simply re-enabling a few more features in IOS that had to be axed to fit it on a phone with limited battery life. True Full multi-tasking comes to mind. Better support for peripherals & ports, and other such stuff.
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