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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.
Apple is not going to kill the desktop OS that is required to write applications for their mobile OS.. Steve Jobs isn't stupid, he knows that people aren't going to be coding 3D games or run photoshop or whatever on iOS. Killing OSX would kill iOS, and Apple knows that.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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".
Good point. We're talking about a guy who started Apple (and then later came back and basically saved it), turned Pixar from a small company into a movie powerhouse, and has been involved in basically reinventing the music industry, the cellphone industry, and maybe the tablet computer market. Sounds like a textbook case of stupidity.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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."
If there is any company that is driven from the CEO down it's Apple. So while you're right that the he of course didn't do it by himself, he is likely a huge driving force behind what the rest of the company accomplished.