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Could Apple Kill Off Mac OS X?
Barence writes "When Steve Jobs announced last night that he was 'going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,' it was the clearest indication yet that Apple is phasing out Mac OS X, argues PC Pro's Barry Collins. 'Over the past couple of months, there have been continual rumours that Apple is testing the iPad's A5 processor in its MacBook range, suggesting Apple believes iOS could stretch further than smartphones and tablets,' Collins argues. Plus, Apple would take a 30% cut on all Mac software if it mandated downloads via the App Store only. 'The only part of Apple's portfolio where iOS doesn't make sense is in the high-end. Yet, Apple's already discontinued its Xserve range of servers and... it's almost exclusively fixated on the consumer market,' he argues."
I can't see an iOS based IDE working.
Apple is not going to kill of Mac OS X. I have said it before, and I'll say it again: Mac OS X's future is on high end workstations, targeting the professional and power user markets. Apple's consumer strategy will be centered on iOS.
Palm trees and 8
Or, should I say "linkbait" instead.
Physicists get Hadrons!
You sure about that ? From what I've seen, most people who have an Apple Product will forever purchase OTHER Mac products. They will purchase EVERY thing that Mac puts out (How many different Mac Laptop/Desktop have you owned/do you own, how many different version of iPad or their MP3 Players ?)
Perhaps you're different, I don't know.
UPS Sucks
In Bill Gates' book from 1995, "The Road Ahead", he discusses how computing switched from "mainframe"-type applications where the bulk of the storage and processing was done by a centralized system, and how that was falling out of favor for a more distributed desktop PC environment. He further predicted this model would eventually revert back to the "mainframe" (now known as "cloud").
Steve Jobs must have read this book.
Apple just recently announced Final Cut Pro X, they've revamped XCode, and they're heavy into LLVM and clang. Doesn't seem like they're ditching the Mac any time soon. An iPad with iMovie is fine, just like Garageband is fine (and a lot of fun to use!), but for my next $100 million dollar blockbuster, I'm going to want more robust tools.
All the content consumed on an iphone, ipad,etc., has got to originate from somewhere, and I think apple would be happy to have both ends of the spectrum: the content producers and the content consumers.
"When Steve Jobs announced last night that he was 'going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,' it was the clearest indication yet that Apple is phasing out Mac OS X, argues PC Pro's Barry Collins
In context, this was while hyping a cloud computing solution that at the moment is a little more than shared storage. To me this isn't a very clear indication of anything except increased interoperability with a cloud service, possibly for automatic synchronization of settings and access to the same documents and media. I'll take that to mean that there is no clear indication yet that Apple is phasing out Mac OS X.
It's just a dumb click-farming review specifically designed to generate controversy. Clearly if you wanted to phase something out, you would release a new version of it...
This is total linkbait. Just like the one from pcworld asking whether OS X Lion could be Apples Vista. This article has no research behind it whatsoever, I do not understand how this trash can get on slashdot, it annoys me. A single quote: "iOS is mainstream: Mac OS X isn’t and likely never will be." Based on what research?!?! Just yesterday at the keynote, they announced that the OS X platform has risen to new heights and the PC market has shrunk. Android is gaining on the smartphone market. Why the hell would they bet everything on one horse if they have two that perform perfectly well?!
Of course they're not going to kill it off. The only people suggesting as much are paranoid Apple haters. If nothing else, Apple will need OS X to enable developers to build applications for iOS devices.
I knew as soon as I heard Steve Jobs say those words about demoting the PC that they would be taken entirely wrongly by some people. But all that he meant is that they're extracting a feature (the storage hub and interconnect of all iDevices) from the PC and moving it to iCloud. He only meant that iCloud sees the PC as "just another device" that isn't given special treatment above and beyond what iOS devices are given. But even then he went on to contradict that statement by revealing the particulars of the implementation. iOS devices will not store all information (songs, photos, etc) that OS X computers will.
In shortthere's nothing to see herejust a misinterpreted phrase from a 2-hour presentation that mistakenly confirms the paranoid beliefs of people who want to see Apple in a negative light. There's no logical reason to believe what the story claims. Apple knows that it needs OS X to maintain its developer community. They know that without the developer community, people would abandon iOS. So until developers can do everything they need to do to create apps for iOS on iOS itself, OS X isn't going away.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Would you shell out the $3500 to get Mac OS X? The way I see it, that is the choice you will have in the near future: iOS for a "consumer" level computer, and Mac OS X for high end "professional" level computers.
Palm trees and 8
You need to read up on the legal definition of a monopoly. What MS was dinged for was using its monopoly in OS and Office software to drive out competition in the web browser software market. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in mobile OS software (iOS is actually losing ground to android); Apple doesn't have a monopoly in desktop/laptop OS software (Windows still accounts for 90+%); Apple doesn't have a monopoly in anything (no, "monopoly in software that runs on macs" is not a legal monopoly, otherwise every single company would have a "monopoly" in some arbitrarily defined, meaningless, sliver "market").
A monopoly is the market power to price your offerings without regard to the price of competitors offerings. Apple doesn't have one, so they can't be accused of leveraging a monopoly they don't have.
Pretty sure that they're not going to kill off a segment that generates about $5Billion/quarter.
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q211data_sum.pdf
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
That's just the thing. I buy Apple computers because I like the Mac. Drop the Mac, and drop me as a customer.
I will say, if Apple plans on dropping OS X, then why did they spend so much effort on Lion? IMO, it's a more impressive update than iOS 5, which is basically just a "quick, let's bring this thing up-to-date with Android" release.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
It's worth remembering that iOS and Mac OS X are just brands. The software stacks are almost identical. iOS has UIKit and AVKit and a few other frameworks, OS X has AppKit and a few legacy frameworks, but aside from that they're basically the same. The kernel is the same. The GUI is the Quartz window server in both cases (just with different window management policies). The core frameworks (libSystem, CoreFoundation, Foundation, CoreGraphics, and so on) are the same on both.
With this in mind, it's not totally unreasonable to consider that they may phase one or the other out at some point in the future. It would be trivial to do, just install whichever missing frameworks people care about on the one that they decide to keep.
The minimal effort involved, however, rather argues against Apple doing it. The most important reason why iOS uses UIKit instead of AppKit is to force developers to redesign their user interfaces for small devices with touchscreens, rather than just ship bad ports of apps designed for keyboard and mouse. If you write an application for iOS or OS X, you can port it to the other reusing all of your model and controller classes, and 90% of any code in custom view classes. Merging the two platforms would mean that developers could easily ship one application for both systems without any modifications, which Apple doesn't want. Given the code sharing between iOS and OS X, there's no real incentive for Apple to kill either - it wouldn't save them very much development cost, because most of the development is already shared.
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Mac OS X gives us more than pretty... it gives us UNIX. I chose Mac OS X because I could get UNIX, and my wife could have pretty.
Take away the UNIX shell and sudo, all that's left is a device that my wife uses. I might as well get her an iPad.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
That's the real problem here. Apple lost the desktop wars a long LONG time ago. Jobs might be willing to concede that completely and try to displace Windows desktops with some form of their more successful platform rather than trying to fight a losing pointless battle with MacOS.
I don't know what you are looking at, but Apple gave up the desktop market share war and started the desktop and laptop profit war, without telling anyone, especially without telling Microsoft and you. And they are winning by a mile. Net income for the company six times that of Dell. Even if only one third were Macs, that would make "Apple Computers Inc. " twice as profitable as Dell.
Highly doubtful.
The Macbook Pro is already a "professional" level computer - millions of developers use it for development. You can get a high end model for a bit over $2000. And take a look at their laptop product line, it's almost perfectly distributed with offerings between $1000 and $2500. iPads cover the range just below that, from $500 to $830; iPod Touches (and subsidized iPhones) right below that from $200 to $400. You can get an AppleTV for $100. None of this is by accident! The don't want consumers to choose one of these devices, they want them to buy all of them. And the iCloud announcement made this even clearer...
Apple has become the 2nd largest company in the world (by market cap) by almost completely giving up the budget segment of the market to others and focusing on customer loyalty and a self-contained ecosystem. Why would they suddenly change that strategy?