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Wall Street Predicts Merge of OS X and iOS
gumbi west writes "One Wall Street analyst predicts what slashdot commenters have predicted for years, that iOS and OS X will merge into a single OS. However the analyst sees this happening because the iOS devices receive a substantial CPU boost from the quad core A6 which can power MBA and smaller devices while following 64-bit ARM processors can bring the remainder of the Apple lineup back to ARM under a single architecture."
Therefore, he's speaking out of his ass.
Don't worry, even if every Mac ran iOS tomorrow, people would still make inaccurate marketshare comparisons between the entire Android platform of devices and just one single iOS device, the iPhone. With iPads and iPods included, iOS far surpasses Android in marketshare, but little facts like that get in the way.
When will I be able to get an ARM laptop?
They already are the same OS, essentially. They have the same core OS and the same basic application framework; only the top-level UI layer is different. Now that desktops are heading toward touch interfaces, it seems obvious that the UI layers would merge at some point.
...from a few years back
They're growing too:
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=ARM.L#symbol=arm.l;range=1y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=;
Hence I share your sentiment, this article is here purely to increase share prices. Who do you think benefits from that? There are vested financial positions behind most articles they print. They do not print real analysis.
Remember, the value of your investments can rise or fall.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
MODS please ban this guy
Apple cannot use the trademarked IOS term on non-phone/ipod platform
GOATSE
This is one of those moronic things that will never happen that are being continuously predicted by people who don't understand anything about usability. Apple knows you can't just shoehorn a "one size fits all" OS onto every device you make; that the ways people use different devices are fundamentally different. Keyboard and Mouse apps do not work well with a touchscreen, and vice versa. Just because Lion imported some of the UI features of iOS like hidden scrollbars and an application launcher does not mean they will merge; they are simply implementing ideas from one platform that have utility on another.
I could live with this if it means iOS+OSX = no more iOS DRM: allow users to gain root and allow users to install apps from arbitrary sources.
You know, like OSX.
If instead it means iOS+OSX means OSX gains the aforementioned DRM, I'm done with Apple forever.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Above link is GOATSE!
And thus mac development will be limited to writing word processing apps?
OSX and iOS share a common base, but it does not mean they will merge. Apple has stated repeatedly that touch screen devices are fundamentally different than desktops/laptops. While they may borrow UI features back and forth they are never going to merge into one unified device or GUI.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
of Wallstreet and Skidrow
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's not what everyone has seen coming for at least the last 6-months
OSX doesn't need -- and never has needed, and likely never will need -- the simplifications and limits that presently show up all over IOS. The current glitch in thinking over at Apple that has informed Lion with IOS like features is, I am confident, in error. On the other hand, the reason IOS needs these limits is because as of this point in time, the hardware itself is extremely limited... fast memory to support real multitasking, video (and main) memory to cache windows, the power budget presently required for same, small space to stuff the OS in, consequent loss of support for things like USB devices and complete bluetooth profiles... these things create IOS's limits; they're not there because they're a better way to do things, they are there because they are one of the only ways to do things, given the present environmental limits.
But electronics, if nothing else, follow a fairly predictable path of increasing compute and display power in less space with a lower power budget. So IOS can -- and therefore should -- leave its limits and its modality behind, bring the capability to do more complex work with it. OSX, on the other hand should continue forward -- not backwards into ISO land.
Finally, since access to Apple's App Store software library isn't open to competing tablet manufacturers, they (the competitors) are likely to strongly differentiate their tablets with USB, broad bluetooth support, a real filesystem and related file management the user can get at if they like, memory cards, and so on... putting some pressure on Apple to do the same (and thereby bringing over already existing OSX capabilities.) And of course consumers like more features -- the more they can do on an iPad, the better they will like it, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the things they could already do. That's the design challenge, but I don't think it is a challenge that Apple will have any trouble at all meeting.
So yeah, we will almost certainly see a merge, eventually. But hopefully it won't be IOS into OSX; just the opposite.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
iOS is just stripped down version of Mac OS X with a different interface isn't it? So the real story is that they are moving towards the iOS GUI if this proves correct.
Wall street people are fairly clueless about anything in the realm of technology, so who cares what THEY think?
Apple has already clearly indicated this in its forecast with "features" like reverse scrolling. Apple, you'd be better off doing more development for (read: finding uses for) the iPad, than trying to make everything one and the same.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
Will be the end of what little corporate uses mac has left even the pure mac photo shop guy will look at windows then put up the limited file systems, app lock down and dumbed down apps and that is on top of paying $2,500 for a good system that LET'S use your own screen or pay about $800 + for a mini desktop + EXT DVDRW + EXT big HDD + Backup disk or for about $1000 or less get good PC + EXT backup disk.
also the price of photo shop / CS and the lack of upgrade pricing on the app store make at price now for CS 5.5 makes apples cut $390-$780 per sale now web hosting much lost a lot less then $390-$780 per sale for adobe to sell on there own.
lmao i love the username too,
Who gives a sh#t
Understand slashdot, you do not, young padawan.
The Wall Street morons can't even see a record tsunami coming in their own 'field'.
If this doesn't happen, whom do taxpayers have to bail out?
If that's where Slushpump gets its technical news now, it's over guys. Shut down the servers, Taco.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs basically said this when he announced Lion a year ago, so the fact that this financial analysis firm is predicting it a year later strikes me as worse than a non-story -- it's a moldy story that anyone who's been following the industry already knows. And both Lion and iOS 5 show this slow but deliberate merger in action. The real news is that Microsoft has decided to follow suit with Windows 8: http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/the-end-both-the-desktop-os-and-mobile-os-upon-us-168915
OS X and iOS merging, Apple branded television, Macs switching to ARMs, subscription based iTunes, iTunes steaming, etc., etc. These things have been predicted by members of the media constantly for years, with subscription based iTunes being rumored for nearly a decade now. Why is this news? When drivers for Macintosh hardware start showing up in prerelease builds of iOS, then you've got a story worth printing. Until then, your argument has about as much weight as me saying they're switching to BeOS on Itanium based chips.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
Hasn't Microsoft already announced that Windows 8 will be doing essentially the same thing (Universal OS across desktop and mobile processors)?
When the iMac gets its touch screen.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Normally I don't create new parent posts when there's already a lot of response, but I feel like just about everyone else who has posted has missed the mark. I'm a pretty hard-core Mac user. I'm certainly not an Apple fanboi - I'm quite unhappy with their new direction and I don't own an iPhone :P. Still, it has been pretty clear for at least a little while that iOS "computers" are Apple's goal. If you read the stories from the original Macintosh development team (check out some here), it's pretty clear that this is what Steve Jobs has wanted forever. His original dream of the Mac was an appliance, everyone having identical models that suit their needs in a generalized, mass produced way. Home computers running something resembling iOS are pretty damn close to that. And to be honest, as much as the prosumer in me screams in rage at it, it makes sense.
Just about everyone I know that went off to a state school after high school either already had or bought an Apple laptop. I know a ton of people that got MacBook Pros, for no reason other than they're middle class and have money. Most of them won't use the resources of that computer for anything even resembling its capabilities. For a large majority of the computer-using populace, an iOS-like operating system is much better suited to their use cases than any of the typical desktop OSes. I know the slashdot crowd hates to accept this, but the average consumer-level computer user clicks the same three or four shortcuts every day: web browser, music player, email client/instant messenger, and piracy software. Bringing a tablet or smartphone-style OS to their home computer is less of a reduction in as opposed to a better targeting of capabilities. The walled garden model provides a huge boost to security (I know people will cry bullshit about that but face it, less attack vectors means less attacks) and makes things drastically easier to use. I hear a lot more about people's grandmothers figuring out how to use iPads than how to use computers.
People in this thread have been talking about a reduce in hardware capability. Personally I wouldn't see that as a given. As hardware has evolved, so has software. Modern OSes and runtimes quite obviously have drastically higher overhead than of years ago. Again, personally I feel that in terms of efficiency operating systems have taken many steps backward. Regardless, MacBook Airs aren't by any definition low-end hardware, and the iPad 2 (and presumably iPhone 5) has an incredibly powerful processor for a handheld device.
I defined myself earlier as a "prosumer." I base that definition off the fact that I make heavy use of the Mac OS X and iOS development tools, in addition to Logic and Adobe software in freelance and hobbyist work. It troubles me greatly that very likely, the consumer Mac OS will soon lack the capabilities that I have always loved it for. My personal theory is that there will be a paid "Pro" upgrade to the next version of Mac OS X, ala editions of Windows. Hell, it'll probably be available on the Mac App Store like the Mac OS X Server upgrade is now. Although I certainly don't like where Apple (and personal computing as a whole) is heading, it really makes a lot more sense.
Nobody ever said Wall Street understood the technology involved in the tech companies they are trading.
What's worse is they don't understand the business end of the tech companies they are trading. Look at how poorly the "professional analysts" do predicting earnings, sales, etc, when compared to the independent bloggers: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/20/another-apple-blowout-quarter-once-again-the-street-blew-it/
The consistently better results from the bloggers show "the data is out there," you just have to understand the company well enough to understand it.
I guess my perspective on the Wall Street analysts is the emphasis on the Anal part; that seems to be where their heads have been on Apple for at least the last several years...
The complaints about IOS-ification of lion make me laugh. Apple have taken 3 major features and implemented them in lion: extensive sandboxing of apps (a good security practice), launchpad (meh, its optional - don't like it, don't use it) and auto save (which is a good thing).
And people are crying like its the end of the world.
OS X and IOS are ALREADY mostly the same. The places they are different are for very good reasons (resource usage, small touch interface). If apple wanted IOS and OS X to be the same (which, quite frankly would be retarded), they would have made them that way from the start.
I've actually upgraded to Lion and have lost precisely ZERO features vs snow leopard (well, except for rosetta, but that wasn't related to the implementation of IOS-isms and was already on its way out).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
No, the scroll bars are a proxy of "where the display is relative to the document", it is a one-step-cognitively-removed representation.
When you "pull" on the graphics/text you are manipulating the document as a physical thing. When you pull on the scroll bar you are manipulating a controller which is itself a machine which moves the document on the screen. That physical analogy is unnatural.
What would be natural?
Now, *these* are *real* scroll bars:
http://www.earlychurchofjesus.org/images2/torah%20book%202.jpg
Really, we need a physical "spinner knob" on our devices---that's the most natural. But it's hard to manufacture and the phone won't fit in a sleek case.
Not going to switch to another proprietary platform ever again. PERIOD. I will run whatever architecture I can run my DirectX games on. Apple if you switch to ARM, fuck you.
Damn trolls...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
They are the same OS underneath, with custom front ends for each form factor. If Apple starts putting the desktop OS in a tablet, its a sign that all the talent has left, salesman have taken over the company *cough Ballmer cough*, and Steve Jobs has just rolled over in his grave.
at least windows phone has comment documents area for some apps, build in trial mode so you don't need a free demo app and a full app, more open to in app user maps, and other custom stuff.
Pretty sure when the iPhone came out we were told that the operating system WAS OSX.
Hmm. First it's OSX with all the berries and security. Than it's re-named iOS when the iPad is added.
Now we can increase share values just by claiming they're one and the same again.
Amazing. Accounting/economics is truly a mysterious art. One in which you tell your shareholders you're making boku bucks and then tell the government you're losIng money.
LOL
Is this that why they included OS X server in Lion?
So this guy is saying iOS is going to become a server platform?
That'd be cool! I can finally remove the AS/400's from the lounge, run iOS on my new apple tablet and my laptop! How cool is that!!!!?
Umm.. how much primary and secondary store does one of these new fangled iOS tablets have and what's the 5250 emulation like these days?
Onscreen keyboard?
This is a photo of where all of apples ideas will be coming from, post Jobs.
Apple spent a couple decades on 2 other less popular platforms before they got to Intel and for years they took beatings about performance and fabricating benchmarks or tests to stack the performance the right way. Now they are more than capable of building their own chips, they have the money and the know how but why would they do that again unless the prediction is that there will be a world where they aren't compared to Windows on Intel machines?
Now I could see Mac books and Mac Pros with an ARM chip in them for certain functions and for the custom silicon that Apple adds to them. That doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility. At the end of the day though, someone is going to rip a blu-ray or render some HD video or count the FPS with some game and compare that number to the one made on a Dell with an Intel Core x in it and that's going to be that.
Well I agree that it is not wise, I think Apple with try to do it.
As for the argument that you can shoehone a "one size fits all", you are missing the concepts; however, when applied to certain OS models is spot on.
Regarding OS X as a whole, it is not designed to be, nor is it a modular OS, and this is why I agree with your base arguments.
OS X has inherent issues that Apple mangled when it put OS X together from XNU, that is a massive spaghetti bowl, with a lot of duct tape and super glue to keep up with the technology. iOS is a better design, but even it has many of the OS X problems and limitations that are fundamental problems with the kernel architecture/model.
Linux also fails the full modular needs of one fits all, even though many people try to make it fit this due to the OSS nature and some base coding that tries to keep it portable. However the monolithic kernel is what fails Linux to be fully modular, and the inherent dependencies that are also a side effect of the unix OS model.
For example, if you look at the Linux kernel used on Android, it doesn't fit, just like you state. Android has to bypass key functions of the Linux kernel and handle them itself using only simplistic calls to the kernel. A good example is Android implementing its own scheduling and memory manager, which is crap. If Android were to use the Linux memory manager and scheduler, it would also have to include a large chunk of other services/functions that would be way too resource intensive/heavy for most phone hardware.
However, modular OS models do exist, and they can handle the one size fits all better than expected.
This is where people need to go old school in thinking and pick back up where the world dropped out in the early 90s. As some of the best OS theories and conceputal designs were abandoned when everyone went back to Linux and OpenBSD when running from Microsoft and the horrible Win3.x/9x/Me generation of OSes. (Which made a lot of sense at the time, as these OSes were crap, but sadly needed for the hardware generation they were designed into.)
So if we go back to where the unix model was failing, in the late 80s, and pick up the best OS model concepts from the time, we can pick out some essential things that are key to a modular/portable/extensible OS model and set of technologies.
This is around the time I was in University, and we spent a lot of time on OS theory and engineering concepts of the time, which is why today it is freaking amazing that the 'crap' we were trying to get away from is still considered to be 'awesome' by a large portion of the OSS world and especially the younger generation.
So taking this in mind, lets pick out a few things that are necessary:
-Object Based Model (Back then was overhead and seen as bad, today the overhead is tiny, and offset by the inherent extensibility.)
-Architecture Agnostic (This is beyond portable, as the code doesn't have to change no matter what the underlying hardware is.)
-Side Scaled Layering (This is moving beyond just a microkernel and a separate kernel API interface set, the layering should be virtually unlimited, with multiple side layers operating in parallel transparently accessing lower layers and providing access from higher layers.)
These are just a few concepts that I remember were the philosopher's stone of OS theory back then.
Oddly, these concepts were implemented in an OS within a couple of years. And as we expected, the OS was 'heavy' because of the complexity these concepts introduce. However, as time progressed, it started to really hit some 'surprising' strides in terms of capabilities and performance in just a few years.
So ask yourself, when you look around at OS technology today, where do you see these conceptual OS theories actually in use?
The best example, is one that people around here ignore and would never expect to be this advanced...
Windows NT (aka Windows 2K/XP/Vista/7)
It fits all these OS 'concepts' that the technology world was tal
I'm a Mac fan, I don't own a Windows device at all, but seriously I think Apple might be staring down the barrel of a repeat of the 1980s and 1990s from next year -- when their market was commoditised by cheaper less crafted competition and Microsoft ate their lunch. PC + Windows was not nicer than Apple then either, but there were any number of manufacturers cranking them out in different configurations blitzing the market. Android has started trying to do this to iPhone, but Google's bet on Chromebooks is still too early -- the NC's time still hasn't quite come yet. But from next year, Windows 8 will be that "not nicer, but now it at last has a finger-touch interface and can run on low-power devices it does the job, and a hundred and one manufacturers can put out a thousand and one different products" swamping them out again. Laptops with touchscreens, pads, convertibles, desktops with touchscreens, pads in different sizes, pedestals, you name it, someone'll be shipping it running Windows 8 and the exact same set of programs that run on all of them, run in your company, run all the browser apps too because Chrome runs on Windows 8 too, run Flash if you want it, use a mouse, or a touchscreen, or a trackpad ... Microsoft doesn't have to care about which ones do or don't sell because the manufacturers take the loss on that; so long as one or more of them are successful they're set. Most competitors are trying to aim a precision rifle at Apple to take them out; Microsoft is loading a cannon full of grape shot and getting every manufacturer in Asia to pay for the ammunition.
If apple made eveything iOs, then what are developers going to code with?
Apple releases an iOs SDK for windows?
*shudder*
Thunderbolt is Intel Only. I can't see Apple, who've invested a lot in the new technology, suddenly dropping it since it wouldn't be able to work on ARM.
Mod parent up, even if it's an AC. You need some Windows VMs to test with IE browsers if you develop for the web. You might say Apple's waiting for Windows 8 for ARM but I bet there will still be a number of WinXP and Win7 users around by then (luckily Vista is dieing out quickly than IE6.)
Furthermore, does anybody knows if virtualization for ARM is as good as virtualization for Intel? Will people be able to run an ARM version of Win8 on an ARM Mac as well as they're running an Intel Windows on an Intel Mac?
Anyway, I can see Apple selling mid and low end Macs with an ARM processor and high end Macs with an Intel one. It will introduce more diversity in their environment than they had in the last few years but I'm sure they can handle it.
Are iOS inspired "features" too.
I see it more as an MB Air with a touch screen and iPad mode, i.e. switch to iPad apps using another CPU (Arm) on the same machine as your i7 MB Air of the future.
some of those guys are the ones that brought the financial system to their knees right?, they usually throw stuff to the wall and see what sticks, why bother when they start "predicting" something said before by other's less technologically challenged than them???
Mark my words. There's a room in Cupertino where this year's iMac is running iOS on the desktop already. People were shocked to hear that they'd been running Intel Macs for years before making the switch. OS X created iOS. iOS created Lion. Lion is the last OS X. iOS X (they'll likely skip iOS 8 and 9) will run on your iPhone, your Apple TV, your iPad and your iMac. This will happen sometime in early 2013.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
I've been saying for a long time that Mac's will eventually became pretty little walled garden the same as iPhones and iPads. And every time I say it, all the Apple fans laugh at me and say "No way would they ever do that." But, once again, mark my words, there will come a day when the only way to install software on any Apple computer is to go through the App Store. They've already started removing optical drives. All they would have to do would be to disable installs from USB drives and that would be that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So the fact that you have been saying something for a very long time now is proof that it will actually, finally, really happen very soon now.
What I also predict, is that someone on WallStreet is heavily invested in Apple stock and is looking to sell at maximum profit, and putting Apple in "the news" most always drives the price of a stock upwards, unless its bad financial news (WallStreet only groks financial semantics). When everything is down in price, getting a little "free publicity" generated is always a good thing for the price of a stock. Just getting the name out there is usually good enough to get some volume of shares moving between hands. Historically you can even look at SCOg, every time they lost^h^h^h^h were in in court more people bought shares, and the price usually went up. It just took awhile for the price to go back down to the dirt cheap value that it deserved. Its just free advertising to these Apple guys, nothing more.
iOS and OS X already share a lot of basic underpinnings. Indeed, you could think of iOS as a sort of fork of OS X. So it makes sense that a lot of redundancies will re-merge over time. It just makes the OS easier to maintain.
On the other hand, the hardware is NOT going to merge. When you buy a PC, one of the things you want is PERFORMANCE. That need isn't going to go away. When you buy a tablet, a major driving convern is ENERGY EFFICIENCY. That isn't going to go away either. There are other differences as well, like weight, multiple overlapping windows, etc. The PC vs. tablet needs are incompatible. It's going to be a LONG TIME before any ARM processor catches up to any Intel processor in peak performance, and likewise, Intel is a long way from competing with ARM architecture on energy efficiency (that x86 translation front-end takes up like half the power budget of an Atom processor).
There are also very differing UI needs. A tablet CAN have a keyboard and mouse but usually doesn't, whereas the PC always does. Moreover, UIKit and AppKit are very well entrenched. It may be that their underlying code will merge into a single library, but they'll expose separate function bindings that provide quite different functionality, and it'll make sense then to break it into three libraries, which is AppKit, UIKit, and the common stuff. (And indeed this may already be the case.)
No, it actually happening will be proof.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The foundation is now much better, fully 64-bit, using OpenCL and Grand Central. You mention FCP7 was long in the tooth, quite true. That's why the rewrite.
The problem is that Apple didn't have enough time to finish everything else on top of that core. Apple should have kept it in development for at least another year before release.
The worst thing about this incident isn't the software itself. It's the proverbial slap in the face to professional editors. It makes everybody wonder what the future holds for FCP if Apple is willing to release such an incomplete product. Might as well switch to a product you know will be supported in the long run, because Apple may decide to drop FCP.
The new scroll system is designed to go with touch pads. You no longer need to deal with the metaphor of a scroll bar. You directly manipulate the pad as if it were the document.
Notebooks are the majority of Apple sales, with touch pads in them. Apple also has a touch pad for desktops. This metaphor also works in the touch mouse, although you would use one finger instead of two. So this isn't just a software change, it's a hardware/software change.
I do see a problem in that you don't know if there is anything to scroll at first glance. That needs to be fixed.
The real news is that Apple has copycats? Uh, ok...
No, it actually happening will be proof.
And it not actually happening will be proof to the contrary. It hasn't happened yet, and it hasn't "not happened" yet, so there's no proof one way or the other, there's just a bunch of loudmouths offering their guesses about the future as solid predictions. (The trouble with predicting "X will happen" is that it's obvious when the prediction is proven true, but, in general, it's not always obvious when the prediction is proven false; unless there's a time limit on the prediction, or something happens that makes it obvious it'll never happen - e.g., Apple getting out of the computing equipment business and switching to running a line of luxury hotels, or something such as that - the predictor can always weasel out of it by saying "well, it hasn't happened yet, but, mark my words...".)
All they would have to do would be to disable installs from USB drives and that would be that.
Yeah, because God know OS X doesn't have an app called the "Installer" to install package files or the "Finder" to let you drag app bundles to /Applications or a "compiler" and "make" to let you compile source code and do "sudo make install" or.... They'd have to remove a lot more than just the ability to install from USB drives.
(I presume you're not making an assertion that optical drives were removed as part of an Ultimate Plan to keep people from installing apps except from the App Store, as there's no evidence whatsoever to support that assertion. The last time I tried to use the optical drive on my MacBook Pro was a few weeks ago, when I wanted to look at the Snow Leopard disc to see what packages were there - not to install them, BTW - and I can't even remember when I tried to use it before then, so I wouldn't personally miss a built-in optical drive. I might miss one if we got a Mac mini as a media box, as we have a bunch of CDs that we might want to play or burn to disk, but that's about it. Dropping them from computers where people rarely use them, and offering the option of an add-on USB optical drive for those who do need them, makes perfect sense.)
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is really a port of OS X to the ARM platform. The base system is the same. The Cocoa and other API's relating to the GUI layer are different. When you Jailbreak an iOS device, you can actually ssh into a Darwin Unix shell. OS X is a decedent of NeXTStep / OpenStep operating systems which were ported to several different hardware platforms. I am sure that when OpenStep became Mac OS X and ran on PowerPC chips from IBM, that Apple had an Intel version running in their labs since day one. Actually, OpenStep was certainly Intel x86 compatible and they even had a system called YellowBox that ran the NeXT development environment on Windows NT! That meant you could take your OpenStep application code and recompile it to run on Windows NT and even look like a native Windows application. It's this cross platform ability that enabled Apple to leap frog the competition so quickly. Mac OS X is certainly not new, it's an old system that was far ahead of it's time when it was new. It's been enhanced and improved, but it's still the same basic technology. Microsoft had to rip Vista (Win2k8 kernel) apart to create MinWin (internal base OS) which is why Win7 boots so much cleaner. This MinWin was used in Windows Phone 7 OS. It's also the basis for Win8. RIM is way way behind. Yes, they bought QNX but they still don't have an native API development platform for it that even comes close to Android or iOS.
Knowing all this history clarifies a few points that may be true from the article. Apple custom A6 ARM chips may actually make it into Apple laptops and desktops down the road. Course Apple's latest hardware is all 64bit so this depends on the future A6 chip being 64bit and including multiple cores as well. Apple is not re-inventing ARM per se so that means they will wait until ARM catches up and do their normal custom A# thing to make it meet their needs. Yes, I think Apple may actually do an ARM thing but it's way down the road. It's dependent on ARM providing similar spec's to today's Intel CPU's. Porting OS X to such a hardware platform is rather trivial for Apple. However, I do not see iOS and OS X merging into a single OS. The whole reason for using the stripped down iOS is to make it easier to utilize the extensive infrastructure and API's that OS X brought to the table via it's NeXTStep / OpenStep heritage. All the Cocoa library objects start with an "ns" header in the name. The .App bundles can contain multiple platform binaries within an application. i.e. PowerPC, Intel32, Intel64, ARM, SPARC, etc. This is how OpenStep did it many years ago and it's the way Apple did it with PowerPC/Intel Universal Binaries. It's how they will do it again if switching hardware platforms makes sense.
Bottom line, OS X and iOS are not going to become one. But OS X may run on ARM down the line. iOS will continue and do it's own thing for some time to come. It's running on iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV2. iOS might even replace the custom firmware in Airport Extremes, Airport Express, and the Time Capsule.
...that people on Wall Street really are idiots.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It doesn't make sense to merge the 2 OSs until they're on a common platform. Actually, it makes more sense to put the Macs (at least the Airbooks and other laptops) on the same CPU - the A5 or A6, before they think of merging the OSs. Only problem - the ARM architecture is currently capped @ 32-bits, which means that anything above 4GB of RAM cannot be addresed. But if Lion doesn't need anywhere near that, and if iOS too is happy w/ less than that, it may not be a problem. Other option - Apple moves its entire platform from x86 to A5 - Macs, Airbooks, iBooks, and so on, and ports all its OS-X apps to iOS. Or else, move OS-X to A5, and if computing power is an issue, maybe make SMP based systems, and even have segregated memory for each CPU to get around the 4GB limit. Incidentally, is iOS SMP capable? If not, maybe just use A5 as the common platform, but maintain the 2 OSs for their respective platforms, like today.
And toshiba has a similar product, the 100ac. That one is powered by a tegra chip.
Comes with android by default, and can get Ubuntu installed on it.
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