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Users Don't Want iOS To Merge With MacOS, Apple Chief Tim Cook Says (smh.com.au)
Rebutting a widespread speculation, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said the company is not working toward building an operating system that both Macs and iPhones could share. From his interview on Sydney Morning Herald: Later, when I ask about the divide between the Mac and iOS, which seems almost conservative when compared to Microsoft's convertible Windows 10 strategy, Cook gives an interesting response. "We don't believe in sort of watering down one for the other. Both [The Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two ... you begin to make trade offs and compromises. "So maybe the company would be more efficient at the end of the day. But that's not what it's about. You know it's about giving people things that they can then use to help them change the world or express their passion or express their creativity. So this merger thing that some folks are fixated on, I don't think that's what users want." A surprising comment, considering rumours from well-connected reporter Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who wrote the company is working on a project called "Marzipan", which involves merging the codebase of macOS and iOS apps.
We saw what it did to Windows 10. It's.... not gud.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
People on Slashdot keep claiming merging the two is what Apple is working towards. Perhaps this explicit statement from the CEO that users do not want it and Apple has no plans to do so are enough to quiet the minds of such people, for at least a little while.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
UI and capabilities can be as different as users want them to be, but there is no need to force internal and external developers to do duplicate work. Few of iOS games are ported to OSX, the difference should only be in control scheme (and iOS/Apple TVs should trivially support paired Bluetooth input devices). The only reason to not do this now is if engineering effort is too high.
Any attempt to merge the two would hurt both platforms.
Making iOS more like MacOS would result in an overly bloated mobile operating system. iOS needs to be simple, mostly stateless, and perform well on mobile hardware.
Making MacOS more like iOS would be crippling the operating system. MacOS is VASTLY more capable in every way than iOS and works great for beginners and power users alike. Taking away features or putting it in a walled garden to make it more like iOS would be a HUGE disservice to its users.
Pretty much the ONLY thing I could agree with that would be a good idea to make MacOS more like iOS would be to add touch screen capability to Macs. It would be a useful and OPTIONAL feature that many would appreciate. But that's about it.
Yes, the use cases for both are different, but there's no reason an upcoming iPhone can't power a wireless KVM with ease. Having one device to carry is what people want, and the non-private iCloud sync isn't a replacement for integration. Of course "Mac Mode" should run with KVM semantics and not with mobile semantics. So Tim is right.
And so are the people saying a merger is on the horizon.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Absolutely agree with Cook, Mac OS and IOS are operating systems serving very different devices and therefore need separate types of operating systems. Obviously Apple saw the disaster of what Windows 8 was and realized one size OS doesn't work and is full of compromises. Microsoft is still trying to make something work for all devices with Windows 10 without a lot of real success. Give Cook credit for realizing the tablet and notebooks are used in different ways and developing operating systems that complement them.
Apple Pencil is actually a really nice stylus albeit expensive. My company bought me one and the iPad Pro to go with it. Much more comfortable to write with than the rubber tipped styluses out there.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
So what he's really saying is that OSX will continue to die from neglect until everyone gets on-board with using a tablet for everything.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
...is disturbing.
...finally fixing the remote desktop. That would be supercool, connecting to your mac over the internet. Right now, everything I tried is too slow.
Finder for ios is needed and side loading.
If the IOS lock down comes to mac os apple is dead. Right now there lack of good pro hardware is killing then in that market.
What they want is an iPad Pro that runs MacOS.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
We made a smart phone. For smart users. And those are the ones that do not ask stupid questions. Next.
If a merging of both was the wet dream of our consumers, they should buy the alternative from Redmond. Next.
You people are not asking for the impossible. You can join that line over there, behind those people waiting for the return of the headphone jack on the phone.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
What makes sense would be the old Mac Pro back. Not something that looks like an art sculpture, but a plain old tower. Yes, it will cost a bunch, but for what true workstation users want/need, there isn't anything else that beats true PCIe. Thunderbolt is OK, but 4 PCIe lanes pale in comparison to the latest motherboards that have 64+ PCIe lanes for GPUs, RAID storage, and other things that are required for high end work. This isn't cheap, and most users don't need it, but for users who do, it is worth having.
The iPad Pro is essentially already a "smallish" laptop(and largish tablet). The hybridization is where the two form factors meet. I'm sure Tim knows this already.
Keyboards are becoming less relevant in the spaces where ultra laptops and tablets live.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Keyboards are only "less relevant" until you need to do some real work. Touch-screen keyboards suck, voice/text recognition is less reliable than pressing keys to type.
I don't think that's what users want.
Right. Just like a headphone jack on the iPhone, or Thunderbolt-2 and MagSafe ports on the MacBook Pro, which absolutely no users want at all.
not a mac fan anymore but back in the day when this was the first it became a worry, the problem is nobody wanted their pc os to get dumber, which is exactly what would happen, rather than the phone os becoming something that can do actual work.
Instead of saying what you think they'd answer?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Floppy has been sucessfully replaced by SD cards. Stronger device, smaller, and gigabytes have replaced 1.44 megabytes.
..Then little imacOS will be brought in by the stork.
I wish the new family all the best, but really, we don't care.
Slashdot should really stop post clickbait articles on what Apple *aren't* doing, although I'm sure it's a major coup for the journalist at the Green Guide to interview one of the world's most influential CEOs from the other side of the planet.
If he's not interested in marketing products we basement dwelling nerds would be interested in, that's okay. We have differing tastes and companies that pursue our ideas of innovation will gladly take our money.
I don't see any reason why Apple doesn't add the touch screen display to its line of laptops with MacOS. It will simply give a user more flexibility. Every once in a while touch screen is natural to use.
Likewise, there is no reason why Apple doesn't add a mouse/touchpad support for IOS. Primarily for use with add-on keyboard. When you use a detachable keyboard with Ipad, it is more natural to use a mouse pad rather than moving your fingers from the keyboard to display. Yeah, I know, they are keyboard shortcuts to navigate the display, that's not as intuitive as using the mousepad for that purpose.
Yeah the Chrome tablets are an interesting development - a platform that merges a WIMP environment with an app platform.
'Users' have convinced themselves they don't want a touchscreen laptop, even when I point out that an iPad Pro is a touchscreen laptop.
The iPad Pro already has a hardware keyboard.
With a shit interface if you use it as a "laptop." Having to lift your hands off the KB to point and click is beyond irritating.
Complain to Tim Cook! :-)
Hey Tim, "user" wonders why there's no touchpad on the iPad keyboard. Android supports mouse input.
Nipple-mouse please, touch pads are for pikers :)
A iPad that runs desktop MacOS, not a Mac that runs iOS. Call it the iPad for actual pros.
Yes. I don't like to use iOS, because I don't like its restrictions.
Sometimes I need a touch screen, but Apple doesn't currently make a Mac with a touch screen.
I wish Apple would make a transparent pane or something, that I can put in front of my iMac, that can be used as a touch screen.
Or create a Mac (running macOS) with a touch screen built-in.
Last choice - an iPad Pro that runs macOS. (But I prefer the size of my 27" iMac to the size of an iPad Pro.)
I really hope Apple doesn't replace macOS with iOS (with iOS's restrictions). That would force me away from the Mac.
We saw what it did to Windows 10. It's.... not gud.
Actually, the Windows 10 UI was fine, what was wrong in Windows 10 was the migration away from being a software centric company to a company that tries to make the user base its beta testers, forced upgrades, as well as breaking a good amount of compatibility b/w Windows 7 and 10 applications. Oh, and moving to the Windows Store as a primary way of getting new software: the better software is still software that one has to either get a DVD for, or download from a website. Notice that Office does not get distributed via the Windows store.
On Apple, they have actually made OS X too similar to iOS. One thing I wish they did - use the A series CPUs for the Macs as well, instead of basing the iOS devices on those but Macs on the x64.
Precisely! Giving Windows 8 an UI similar to Windows Phone 8 was pretty inane. When I got my first Windows 8 laptop, the experience was so bad that I wiped it out for PC-BSD. (Of course, it's another thing that PC-BSD has stagnated ever since becoming TrueOS)
Windows 10 had the right idea of giving the user the option to choose b/w a Windows 7 like 'Desktop mode' vs a Windows 8 like 'Tablet mode'. While there are several things about Windows 10 that I don't like, the UI ain't one of them.
If Tim Cook thinks merging iOS and MacOS would result in compromises then he lacks imagination and should not be leading Apple.
Done properly the software could make the best use of what ever hardware it finds itself running on so the user gets to pick and choose how and where they want to use it. I'm a user and a programmer, for 40 years, so I speak from a bit of experience and I apparently have a lot more imagination than Tim Cook. If he can't imagine better things then he needs to get out of the way of people who can.
Over the past few years, Apple has replaced several OSX apps that worked well with new ones that are less functional, to get feature parity between OSX and iOS. Replacing iPhoto with Photos, for example.
Now that the penny has dropped, it's time to stop limiting OSX apps to the level of their iOS counterparts.
Floppy has been successfully replaced by SD cards. Stronger device, smaller, and gigabytes have replaced 1.44 megabytes.
Except on Apple systems where there is no SD card slot and one damn USB-C port which is needed for other things, but only one thing at a time without a dongle. So Apple replaced the floppy with nothing.
I'm not an Apple user anyways, but I was expecting Apple to at least try to go after this.
I mean, I do understand how hard it is to come up with a perfect mix on this, but I'm expecting that at some point we'd have devices flexible enough to work both in tablet or laptop/desktop mode without any compromises.
This is probably something that'd have to be lead by Apple, like it or not. Microsoft is absolutely clueless on what to do with Windows these days, what with scaring away people with telemetry, trying to force stupid old ideas like Windows 10S, and just running out of stock for it's last Windows phone units.
Android and Chromecast just won't do.
Linux has all but killed it's first and last attempts on adapting to smartphones and tablets, there are no big active developments, and it just seems that the OS will never work well with those.
I haven't gave up on my dream of having a single device/hardware for all though. But with Windows laptops using mobile CPUs showing up, smartphones becoming more powerful by the day, and the need for a more streamlined computing experience... I'm not sure why Cook would outright deny the whole thing like that. Obviously, it plays against the company. They'd be selling one less device per costumer there. This is the point I hate corporations going for anti cannibalization stuff instead of what's best for costumers.
But eventually, the market figures it out.
Uhm, let me check my Mac Mini... yep there's still an SD Slot there.