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."

Comments

He's a Wall Street Analyst

[Anonymous Coward]

Therefore, he's speaking out of his ass.

ARM shares are up by 80%

[improfane]

...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.

Never going to happen.

[avihappy]

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.

Re:Never going to happen.

[avihappy]

Remember that Apple, like every single other company out there, has the single purpose of maximizing its profits for its shareholders. Everything else is irrelevant. If you believe otherwise, you need to learn some history.

And the way they do that is by making products people want to buy. Running the same UI on both a Mac, tablet, and phone will result in a sub par experience on all three devices and will surely drive away users. iPhones have no business running a windowed GUI, and Macs need to be able to have multiple windows up due to their expanded screens space. Macs use indirect interaction with highly precise input devices, while iPhones and iPads are direct interaction and have a fairly imprecise input mechanism. So many fundamentals are so different that merging the two UIs would make their devices desirable to no one. Not to mention the fact that iPhones have many more sensors than a Mac. If Apple wanted to pursue your strategy, they wouldn't do it by merging their operating systems. They would do it by locking down OS X while still keeping it as a separate platform.

Re:Never going to happen.

[drinkypoo]

Just go back through stories on Slashdot and you will find stuff from the front page. But I'm not bored enough for that.

I can't even find info on the old stupid launcher. I think it was in OS 8. Maybe just 7. Might have been performa-only or something.

Re:Never going to happen.

[vlueboy]

I found some screenshots of the launcher here. I lived in the launcher days. It had a similar interface to the classroom-friendly "At Ease" tab-folder manager. There is some other feature whose name I can't remember, which I became very fond of because it allows OS 8.5+ to minimize folder windows to the bottom of your screen as small tabs whose "body" would only pop up when clicked. It could be filled with shortcuts and documents without cluttering the desktop.

That functionality was available in OS 9 as well. 9 became "Classic" when 10 began to emulate it. The Classic emulator was meant only for individual applications, so OS 9's shell enhancements such as the Chooser and the Launcher were probably out of the question unless you were one of the lucky few mac geeks dual booting into their full-featured OS 9 installs prior to the sale of the last OS 9 CD. Classic itself was phased out around 10.3 or so IIRC. All in all, it seems like 8 and 9 were a lot less hard for Apple to "sunset" than 2000 and XP have been for Microsoft. Seeing how easily iOS gets phased out for "valid" phones every year, Apple won't have any problem pushing an OS / phone merge. The problem will be convincing people on BOTH sides that they were "upgraded" to the right interface. But knowing Apple's success stories, there will be much complaning followed by lots of obedience and NONE of the expected retractions.

Nobody has thus far been able to make Apple bring back the killed built-in floppy drive, nor the Appletalk applets, nor the ADB (mouse) ports, nor the SCSI interface, nor the Classic OS, nor PPC support, nor the fullscreen-quicktime videos (without paying 30 bucks or playing around with Applescript). I hear the server tools got downsized for Lion, since they downsided the pricing model radically, whether you want it or not. I heard that this meant NFS and unlimited FTP clients were also removed. Apple does not fall back on its changes. Entire infrastructures have needed to change for every industry that relies too much on each one of those components, and that is why Apple is more unstable to businesses; they are not cheap to begin with, and they have a lot of bittersweet features that get the plug pulled. My nostalgia and Unix side still has a strong pull favoring flunking $900 for a mac mini server that I can't quite explain.

Let's hope this means iOS becomes more like OSX

[Kethinov]

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.

I predict a merge too

[FudRucker]

of Wallstreet and Skidrow

Here's my take:

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:Here's my take:

[hairyfeet]

The problem with your thinking the current trends at Apple are a glitch is simple, Steve isn't there and unless/until Steve comes back I have a feeling you are gonna see "the return of the Pepsi guy" as far as bumbling incompetence goes.

It isn't just Lion either, look at how they burned and pretty much destroyed their small but quite lucrative market in movie/TV production by burning all the pros by replacing FCP with iMovie. Losing that market wasn't only stupid because of the money it generated, but even more than that it generated tremendous buzz for Apple by making them "the hip machine" which made the movies and TV shows you watch every day. You'd always see some director or producer on the behind the screens type shows in front of an Apple machine. Now that market is gone, switched to the competitors, and all that buzz is gone with it.

Then there is the "don't say malware and don't help the customer" stink, which wouldn't have happened under Jobs, hell I bet the folks here can think of plenty of others. As much as Ballmer is a sweaty used car salesman, throwing shit at a wall in a "me too!" fest hoping something sticks? It doesn't even compare to Apple without Jobs. You just have to give that man credit where credit is due, he is the one who cuts through the BS and has the vision to see what needs to be done.

Just let me leave with this little story I read by one of the guys who developed iDVD which i think illustrates why Apple has to have Jobs at the helm..."So we knew Steve was coming to look at what we were doing that day, so I had worked with my team to come up with all these mockups, with tabs for the various features and all the extras, when in walks Steve. He completely ignores what we've laid out and walks over to the whiteboard. He draws a box and says "This is the product. You drop a movie in the box and a single button comes up that says "burn" and that's it. that's what I want" and then he put down the marker and walked out while we stood there with our mouths open."

And THAT is why you HAVE TO have Jobs at the helm of Apple. Without him the team was thinking button fest and featureitis and BAM! Jobs walks in and cuts through the shit. Even though I'm not an Apple guy I will give that man credit, he has earned his place in that tiny circle of kings of their domain, where they can be named by just their last names, Jobs, Buffet, Gates, Ellison. Like 'em or hate 'em each one knew what they wanted and had the drive and big brass balls to get things done. If Lord forbid Steve kicks the bucket I have a feeling it'll be a seriously bad time at Apple, maybe even worse than the Pepsi guy.

Re:Here's my take:

[Y-Crate]

It's a bit presumptuous to declare the pro video market "gone" after a month of a new release.

FCPX is broken down to its foundation. No audio tracks? No EDLs? No ability to keep project files outside of the app itself? The list goes on. Every professional editor I know is deciding between going to Premiere or (back to) AVID. (Sorry Sony, Vegas isn't even on the radar)

FCP is done. We've had the rug pulled out from underneath us, and we're not going to hang around and hope that the scraps of a good app left will ever be woven into something useful for actual production work.

FCP7 was long in the tooth already. The last major update wasn't even a major update. The market's confidence in Apple to deliver pro-grade editing software is simply gone.

Re:Here's my take:

[ColdWetDog]

Apple clearly has screwed professional video editors with FCPX. This is just one more example of Apple moving aggressively towards the Money. It apparently feels that there is a larger market for iMovie + (which is what FCPX really is) than a true, professional video editing suite. Look at other Apple software - Aperture - not as powerful as Photoshop / Bridge and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite. Not nearly as expensive. Good enough for some, but certainly not all professional photographers and not used much in bigger shops where Adobe is king (or queen depending on what you think of those maroons). Pages - not professional at all but more than adequate for most people.

Apple dropped X-serve, hasn't aggressively upgrade the MacPros, has aggressively upgraded it's laptops and whatever you consider the iMac to be. Lion server certainly isn't pitched at the Enterprise.

Apple is looking for a specific set of markets that they can grow in. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be at the performance end of either hardware or software. I think Apple believes that there are many more sales to be made in this space (Prosumer? Pseudo professional? I'm not sure what you would call it) than either at the bottom, where the don't compete at all, or at the top where they haven't been a dominant player in some years.

They're doing what is good for Apple's bottom line, not necessarily what is good for your wallet or sanity. If you're on the bus, well it's a sweet ride. If you don't like the route, well, off you go. The Microsoft / Adobe / Sony / Avid / etc. bus will be here shortly.

Re:Here's my take:

[ColdWetDog]

I think you've pretty much nailed it (in fact I repeated much of what you said a bit above). Apple is very focused on a specific part of the market that has been ignored by the Geeks that run the other computer companies: The enormous slice of people with credit cards and no ability or desire to understand the technical underpinnings of what they are using. The Appliance People.

Hopefully, they won't drink too much of this heady Kool-Aid and will leave OS X fundamentally alone. Time will tell....

Re:Duh.

[TheRaven64]

AppKit on OS X 10.7 already adopts a lot of the event model from UIKit. The reason that Apple keeps them separate is the screen size. Designing a UI for a small touchscreen is very different from designing one for a laptop or desktop with a large screen and a keyboard and mouse. You can share 90% of the code between a Mac and iOS app, but you have to rewrite the UI. This was a good decision - I own a Nokia 770, and it has a lot of ported Linux apps, 90% of which are horrible to use because they were never designed for such a small screen. Sure, you can use AbiWord on it, but 60% of the screen is filled with UI widgets, with only a small sliver for your document. Meanwhile, Android apps are all designed for the small device, even if they're ports of desktop apps.

Re:Duh.

[mrxak]

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.

Nobody ever said Wall Street understood the technology involved in the tech companies they are trading.

Steve Jobs said this a year ago -- so a duh

[GMGruman]

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

Re:Stupid and technically ignorant

[Serious Callers Only]

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.

I'm afraid your subject line is a better description of your post than the original speculation.

Apple has stated repeatedly all kinds of nonsense - for example originally HTML apps on iPhone were 'a really sweet solution' and the future of iOS, before iBooks was launched 'no-one reads any more', before the iPod Nano was launched 'no-one watches video on these tiny devices', Carbon was an equal partner and would always be supported, until it wasn't. etc, etc, etc. Most of their public statements are misdirection or misinformation, so if you're trying to work out what they are going to do, I wouldn't attempt to quote Apple pronouncements as if they are gospel or revealed truth. You can in fact usually see them do the exact opposite of what they claim they will. It is more instructive to look at what they have done with Lion: started to merge the UI of iOS and Mac OS.

There are two issues with merging iOS and Mac OS, neither of which are a deal-breaker:

* The two have a completely different (though substantially similar and overlapping) UI stack and set of APIs. iOS is the newer one and has been getting the most attention the last few years - draw from that what conclusions you will.
* The two do not have compatible UIs, and the desktop UI would not make sense on a touch screen and would be impossible to use. The touch screen UI and conventions however, works pretty damn well on a desktop, and you'll see a lot more of it on the desktop in future, as Jobs has obviously decided that overlapping windows, saving files, hierarchical folders, and the desktop itself, are yesterday's UI.

When I open launch control on Lion, or swipe around the UI, it feels very like using my iPad - I expect that feeling to continue to grow until NSView etc are simply deprecated, and the new shiny APIs are all available both on iOS and Mac OS, and then eventually we'll get to a point where they have one OS again. From a technical point of view, it's insane for them to maintain two very similar APIs indefinitely, particularly when they are becoming more and more similar. It is quite possible for them to merge them, and you might not like it, but Apple really don't care what you think.

Personally I think they are clearly going to merge the two, or rather iOS will subsume and replace what remains of Mac OS, as Cocoa did Carbon, and Carbon did Mac OS 9 - Apple is not afraid to completely throw away the rule book, piss off third party developers yet again, or completely contradict their recent statements with their actions. That's what makes them interesting, and somewhat dangerous.

Makes Sense (though WS is late to the party)

[Lord_Jeremy]

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.

Re:ARM laptops

[renegadesx]

I'm just waiting for someone to port Linux to it.

Priceless

lol

[smash]

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).

not quite

[mbkennel]

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.

Is he predicting that performance won't matter?

[Nelson]

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.

Apple staring down a gun

[williamhb]

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.