Apple’s new iPad Pro is the twelfth iPad to be released since the original debuted back in 2010, and it borrows features from two of Apple’s existing tablets. The new iPad Pro has the size and weight of the iPad Air 2 – 9.7-inches, which Apple notes is by far the most popular of its three iPad size choices – while bringing over the power and accessories of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro launched last year. (Yes, the new iPad Pro and the existing iPad Pro have the same name – you’ll have to get used to identifying them by size.)
Apple’s event today was one of the most telling events it has held in years, and I specifically chose the new iPad Pro 9.7″ to focus on. As far as products and announcements go, the event wasn’t all that monumental; it was the tone and wording that really set this event apart from all others. This wasn’t Apple talking about new products today – this was Apple talking about how it sees the future of personal computing.
On several occasions during the event, Apple referred to the iPad Pro – both the new 9.7″ model and the old 12.9″ model – as their vision for the future of personal computing, and Tim Cook referred to the 12.9″ model as a “giant step” toward the “future of computing”.
Read between the lines of today’s event, and you could clearly see the writing on the wall: after letting the Mac and specifically OS X languish since the release of iOS, and after internal struggles about which of the two – or both – platforms to focus on going forward, it seems like Apple is letting the world know that it finally made a choice, and that choice is iOS.
I’m not basing this solely on today’s event, of course, but also on the lack of development on OS X, the lack of consistent Mac hardware updates over the years, and insights I’m getting from people who… Know Apple things better than we do. I already mentioned it in the previous news item, and I’m going to state it plainly and bluntly again to drive the point home: as far as Apple is concerned, the Mac and OS X are the past. Their eventual death won’t be sudden or clear-cut, but the gradual decline of the platform’s importance in Apple has been ongoing for a long time now, and will only accelerate from here on out.
I’m not saying this is either good or bad – those of you who follow me on Twitter and are intimately aware of my ‘life’ with iOS can guess in which camp I belong – I’m just spelling out what’s pretty obvious between the lines. I’ll leave it up to you if this makes you happy or sad.
We’ve got an interesting number of years ahead.
Until there is a development environment for iOS on iOS (Xcode for iOS?) I would say the Mac is pretty safe. Multitasking on iOS needs to improve a whole lot as well. The direction is there and I do like my iPad Pro but it is no way a Mac replacement as yet.
No, thats not correct. That’s in the box thinking.
The more correct phraseology: Until there is a development environment for iOS that is on an operating system other than OSX, then OSX is safe.
Apple has written Windows software in the past. It also has clang that works on linux. If they want to ditch OSX, it might be easier to move the development to a different operating system.
Or alternatively, at the end of real development of OSX, they could simply keep it limping around with security updates and Xcode updates and free themselves of the burden of designing hardware by opening it up to run on any pc. So OSX would live on, kind of, but the Macs would be dead as new hardware.
Yes, and those who have to use it curse them every day for it. If iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari represent the full extent of their Windows development abilities, then they’d better keep OS X alive if they want any more apps for iOS or else make XCode for iOS. As much of a monster as Xcode already is, if it were to run on Windows the way iTunes does, no one would go near it.
Hey, man. Back in the day, if we wanted to develop on Mac OS 8/9 we had to use metroworks CodeWarrior. People still ran it to do what needed to be done. Xcode on windows couldn’t be much worse.
Ah, Metroworks. I do indeed remember that… and I still suspect Xcode for Windows would be far, far worse.
Why? I’ve used ProjectBuilder on Windows and it wasn’t all that bad. I’ve also used Openstep for Win32 and likewise, it wasn’t all that bad. It worked exactly the same way as it did on OpenStep at that time.
*sigh* I’ve used Codewarrior on Mac, Windows, and QNX back in the day at school without much issue. What was wrong with it?
Well, YMMV, but for me, it was buggy, crash prone, and had a very confusing UI. Probably the worst IDE I’ve used.
It wasn’t so bad for me, just dog slow. The worst IDE I’ve ever used… tough call. Probably, though not technically an IDE, that’d be Emacs. Of actual IDEs, probably Visual Studio pre-2012. I absolutely hated the enormous intellisense files it would drop in my source tree, messing up my revisions. For all I know it still does that, but I haven’t used it since.
Really? Emacs?
Code warrior was just odd coming from Visual Studio, Borland or the like. Probably because it was very Macish.
Well, MacOS was a buggy unstable platform to begin with.
Personally it didn’t strike me as being that unintuitive, but then I have this nasty habit of RTFM. So who knows…
Wasn’t the whole thing with the Human interface guidelines that everything was supposed to be understandable without a FM?
I mean I figured it out, but not without some tribulation as my research advisor applied some intense pressure. Why couldn’t I have gotten the guy with the SGI IRIX?
Irix software required even more doses of RTFM.
It was not “box” thinking. There is no way that Apple would make the development environment for iOS (the crown jewels of Apple) be reliant on a non-Apple controlled platform. With all due respect I think it is laughable to believe that Apple would rely on Windows or for that matter anything other than a Apple controlled platform to run the development environment for iOS. I suspect that eventually there will be some kind of development environment either on iOS or web based or some other kind of platform if OSX went away. I don’t think OSX in this case will go away for sometime that why I think it is safe for the time being.
It’s not just iOS developers either. Web devs are primarily using OS X these days, and while they would have an easier time switching to any Linux distro, it’s not going to be an easy pill to swallow (I don’t foresee any large scale return to Windows – bleh).
It’s possible that Apple would toss away its developer users, but I kind of doubt that. They really don’t have ANY story for those users on iPad. It’s possible they’ll add that story, but I don’t think developers are ever going to use a closed and limited system like iOS for development, so any draw would have to include substantial changes.
More likely Apple will follow MS’s lead and simply double down on more technical features for OS X over time. Many of the recent changes/additions have been power user centric already.
One more note on iOS and iPad Pro – it’s not good enough. I’ll buy my wife, and recommend to my family and friends get a Surface Book over an iPad [Pro] every time. iOS is not competitive as a primary OS (not yet). Apple is leaving themselves wide open here. I don’t think Tim Cook and Jony Ives have the vision to avoid the inevitable challenge from Google (MS is either not paying attention or isn’t interested).
Watch out for desktop Android to eat Apple’s iPad lunch. Chromebooks are already doing well – well executed Android would take off like a rocket. I can see desktop Android end up being a viable desktop/laptop dev environment before iPad Pro. Long before.
Again, I don’t think OS X is going anywhere – Apple will continue to dominate top end content production hardware. They get their lunch eaten if they kill OS X.
About TFA (the above is in response to Thom’s musings), it is mostly about Apple targeting a particular segment of Windows PC users – business users, and corporate install bases. This is a classic Tim Cook optimize the pipeline kind of move, and it’ll probably work.
Edited 2016-03-22 16:28 UTC
So you’ll recommend they get ads shoved down their throat via Microsoft? Glad you’re not recommending anything to my family.
This is not a real concern. Grow up.
Apple is rapidly becoming a pure consumer electronics company. The Macbook Air is really just phone hardware in a laptop form factor. It won’t be long before the rest of the Macs follow he same path.
If OSX is dead where do we go from here?
IOS leaves a lot to be desired if you want to be productive.
Windows 10?
Who wants to live like a force fed duck?
Did run up Mint Linux, loved it, unfortunately compromised at the source.
I still have my Beos disks somewhere …
iOS is not productive at all for us, old fashioned super techie people… but iOS is super productive for common people and the new generations born with an iPad in their hands.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a shit about iOS but Apple focusing on it makes 100% sense from an economical POV. It’s the way to go.
I only ask one thing to Apple: open source OSX and release it to the community. Stop destroying it, let us, the people who really love OSX maintain it.
Not even for use younger generations is it useful past drawing and image editing. You can’t really do a lot of tasks that fit into the “productive” category well, certainly not better than on most desktop system including OSX. If they developed programs that were equivalent of their desktop ones, like Microsoft tried to do with Office 15, then maybe but it just hasn’t happened yet.
Sidenote: Apple wouldn’t open source OSX. If the last few years have shown anything it’s that apple didn’t ever really care about open source and only backed OS projects because they were the low market-share minority. Once they had a majority in a field (mobile) they only really kept up the few OS projects that they couldn’t feasibly shut down like Webkit, LLVM and CUPS
Darwin was open source but community didn’t give a.
And as if open sourcing it would solve problems, we would all be running Linux/BSD already.
And you have any idea how much source iOS shares with OS X?
Edited 2016-03-22 06:06 UTC
The community didn’t care about Darwin (or OpenSolaris) because they already have a kernel (Linux) and Unix coreutils (GNU), released under their beloved Democratic People’s License of GPLv2.
It’s a desktop and sound subsystem that they desperately need, but that’s proprietary in OS X and it’s what sets OS X apart from all the other Unixes out there and brings Apple’s Mac division the big bucks.
Of course, designing a desktop and sound subsystem that works is hard work for the community to do, having to deal with performance requirements, complex APIS, making sound not lag and the like, so let’s brag about our Linux kernel. Have you seen what’s inside a kernel btw? It’s mostly drivers and filesystem drivers down there.
I thought that OPENSTEP/GNUSTEP ran just fine on opendarwin?
As for sound, i realize that ALSA is probably not possible to use, but could not OSS be used?
ALSA replaces and is significantly better than OSS.
And ALSA is quite usable. What’s not is the user level daemons to split it up, which in large part goes back to work by the author of systemd called “PulseAudio” and is another piece of crap.
gstreamer is what most use for the backend now, but there’s still room for improvement, but not every app supports it since like with systemd use of PulseAudio was typically very intertwined into applications and most have not been rewritten to move off of it.
Qt added a nice layer to be able to managed the move (Qt4 Phonon – http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/phonon-module.html, contributed by the KDE folks, replaced by Qt Multimedia in Qt5).
Worst of it is, we didn’t have to deal with Pulseaudio originally. Ah, the good old days. ALSA beat OSS/Free hands down in actual device support. I did prefer the concise nature of OSS’s API better however. Then Pulseaudio came in and for some reason every developer jumped on it, even though it was a solution searching for a problem. These days, nothing beyond the most basic audio playback and recording work in GNU/Linux without removing that pile of shite.
I work in Higher Ed. Student usage of tablets of any flavor is nearly nil. ALL are using laptops, mostly macbooks . If Apple abandons those users, they do so at their own peril.
Apple can say what they want about what they think the future is. They’re not in a position to dictate it though.
Well this is just Apple being Apple, now that they can afford to be their older self.
This thing about being open and all, was a mix of the NeXT engineers brought on board and the need to cater to developers when they were almost broke.
Now they don’t need those UNIX devs that helped them survive, they have plenty of devs doing iOS and Mac OS X store development that don’t care about such ideals and are a better fit to the whole Apple culture that goes back all the way to the early Mac OS System 1.
Thanks a lot!
The ‘store’ is the new OS [/sarcasm].
Wake me up when they have Xcode running on iOS. Until then, this is nothing more than the kind of hand-waving we saw in the early 2000’s about how Windows would be all .Net in the future. Here we are 16 years later, and guess what: NT is still C code, user space is still Win32 + COM, and .NET is nothing more than a framework for applications – just as it was back in year 2000.
The rewrite is the ultimate junior developer solution – always wrong. iOS won’t be a good desktop product until it has cloned all the features that made OS X great in the first place – and OS X had decades to add them. Personally I see their down-scaling of the iPad Pro as the first evidence things aren’t going as planned. Guess too few bought the iPad Mega!
I had a chance to see one up close and personal a few weeks ago, and the size of it struck me as just plain wrong. Not only out of place for an Apple tablet, but way too big for any device short of a specialized drawing tablet like a Cintiq. It was unwieldy and awkward, and the guy who owned it seemed to be trying really hard to justify having it. It definitely screamed “look at me, I can afford an awkward luxury toy!” when he would probably have been better served with a standard iPad (I got the distinct impression he was not using it to create content), or a Surface Pro if he really needed a workstation in tablet form.
As for this spelling the end of OS X, well…wake me up when Apple gets crazy enough to port Xcode to Windows. The whole point of owning a Mac these days (from a developer’s standpoint) is that it’s the only way to develop for iOS. Apple doesn’t want to give up that stranglehold, certainly not to Microsoft. I believe OS X will continue to take on more iOS-like traits as it has in the past few releases, but it will never cease being a fully fledged, productive desktop OS.
That’s not to say, of course, that Apple will continue to use Intel, Nvidia, and AMD parts to build its Macs. I could definitely see an entry level Mac running full OS X on a beefier version of the A9 or its successor within the next year or two. Indeed, this would give Apple the complete control over the Mac ecosystem it hasn’t seen since the PowerPC days. Hell, I’d love to see that just for the coolness of finally having a truly desktop-ready ARM box with no compromises (outside being tied to Apple, of course).
Using the Surface as an example, they just a good enough tablet with keyboard and mouse and they are set.
Using Visual Studio on the Surface is quite ok.
Funny you mention this in thread about OS X.
If you’re thinking of the fact that it replaced the original MacOS, then my reply is that they bought that solution from NeXT.
In other words, effectively the first version of OS X is as old as 1989 and despite that it wasn’t until approx 2003 that their “rewrite” started to run well.
Windows NT is a similar story by the way – took about a decade before it was ready to take over Windows 9x.
Not so sure it was readiness that was the factor. I think it was Microsoft culture. They had a clear division line: 9x for home, NT for work. It was when they dropped that cultural division that NT replaced 9x. Of course, Windows ME helped things along by showing just what a monster the 9x codebase had become.
I guess you could say it was a combination of factors. But like all rewrites I’m sure if you asked the team in 1990 when they started, they’d have said they would be done by 1994 and thus wouldn’t even need to do another version of Windows 3.
Yeah, right if you haven’t been paying attention to the MS world.
The failure of making all teams adopt .NET for Longhorn, gave force to the native side teams, making Microsoft adopt the research in Singularity and Midori to bring out AOT compilation for .NET in Windows Phone 8, .NET Native in Windows Phone 10 and for Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.
Furthermore the alternative design to .NET in the early days, known as COM+ 2.0, was brought back to life, got the COM Typelibraries replaced with .NET Metadata and was rebranded as WinRT.
Since Windows 8, the Windows kernel is actually being made C++ friendly so that it can be compiled as in “C code with C++ compiler”. Since then C++ code is supported in kernel space.
C is considered legacy on Windows.
If you insist in using it, there are third party compilers or the new clang frontend that uses the Visual C++’s backend, known as C2. Which is also being used by the new .NET Native compiler toolchain.
Even the new C runtime library is actually written in C++ with extern “C” for the public API.
WinRT is the future of Windows API. Win32 applications will live inside containers as when Project Centennial gets integrated into standard Windows.
So, no it isn’t plain old C + Win32 as it has always been.
We shall see. So far WinRT has had 3 OS releases and more than half a decade to make a dent in the Win32 app landscape. So far the only thing they’ve achieved is to make most people wonder whether Microsoft still has what it takes to release quality software. Oh and the CEO that approved the rewrite was forced to resign. I wonder if there’s a connection..
Regardless of the naysayer there isn’t any turning back.
It might still take a very releases, but even CP/M, MS-DOS and Win16 APIs were eventually shown the door.
Also similarly with how Apple and Google deal with old APIs.
Like it or not, those that want the newer OS versions will come along, even if screaming along the way.
Those that don’t want can always try an alternative OS.
Thanks for explaining! As far as I know, the drive for C# failed when it couldn’t budge Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player, which were still running happily in COM. All that may have changed later, but those core apps just couldn’t get enough performance from C# to risk the shift.
And I’m not there, but my spies tell me that Edge still uses the same COM code underneath the new UI, but almost no one at Microsoft is left who understands COM, so I don’t expect much in the way of slash-and-burn innovation.
The reports of the Mac’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
They have released a new mac os X every year since iOS came out. They have done more with mac os since ios.
I do see your point though. But I also see apples point. The iPad is one of the best personal computers ever made. It’s very friendly. Approachable to everyone. super portable. And designed for touch.
I suspect that as time goes on, i will be using my mac less while i use the iPad more and more. I have even started importing photos from my DSLR to my iPad
Until my Tablet can run full blown Photoshop and Lightroom then I won’tmake the move to using a tablet for my Photo Editing.
The total number of picture I took last year with my DSLR was > 12,000. Each press of the shutter button consimes 60Mb of storage.
Not even the 256Gb iPad pro can take that and as for Cloud storage? Try using that from places like Kergulen Island (where I was last month) photographing Sea birds. (this is in the southern Indian Ocean)
That shoot alone was more than 5000 images.
all the photographers on the trip used Macbooks. not a windows device in sight.
A device like a macbook plus several TB of pluggable storage is essential for my use case.
The biggest issue I see with the Macbook range has been the delays to the CPU’s that Intel is supply to apple. They got a lot of flack with the last refresh for not using Skylake CPU’s. I’m sure apple don’t want to repeat that again.
What do I want from a new macbook?
2TB of storage inside. 1TB could be non PCI, just plain 6Gb SSD
Thunderbolt 3/display port 1.3
3 USB ports.
The Mac and OS X will be around for at least as long as Apple engineers and designers still need these to do their work. iOS can’t enable that yet.
…OSX is dying.
Edited 2016-03-22 03:46 UTC
I’m calling BS on this article! After six years, iPads are still pretty much expensive toys…oooh they added a pen and keyboard, TOOK THEM LONG ENOUGH!! Now it’s slightly less of a toy. You know what my iPad is best at doing? Yeah it collects dust, it’s really good at doing that. The only people I know who use iPads are those with ADD that mindlessly surf the web…might add more people now that there’s a physical keyboard, but given the $599 price point, I’d still rather take that money and buy a proper MacBook or Laptop with real productivity applications. Seriously what are you going to do with a dumbed down touch interface on a 4K Screen?! Ohh my slider button looks so crisp and massive on this 4k screen.. Whoever wrote this must have an absolute crap memory, if they would recall Windows 8 and Metro Apps…how’d that work out for Microsoft? Yeah absolute disaster…Dumbed down touch apps are not replacing, highly granular desktop applications, they simply are unable to represent all the functionality that the traditional point, click, menu and icons paradigm does. That is not to say that touch and scaled-down mobile applications don’t have a place. They certainly do. Case in point, I’ll be setting up new software for a client of mine this year, it has both mobile and desktop versions of the application. The mobile version will be primary used for simple Point of Sale operations with credit cards. Cash sales, Scheduling, Reporting and all analytical work however will be done on the PC as trying to do all these things on an iPad or an iPhone would be ridiculous and simply cannot be done efficiently on a touch interface with a scaled down touch app! It’s just not practical. Just as one of the previous posters was discussing the failure of trying to make .NET something that one uses at the kernel level, it’s just not practical now as it was 15 years ago!! OS X Is NOT DYING!! iOS is complementing it.
OS X may die someday, but we have a long way to do go before that happens. Mac sales are still up and the amount of revenue generated for the company, while smaller than some other divisions, is still enormous.
OS X will die when the cost of producing Macs falls below (or gets close to) the revenue generated. I don’t see that happening any time soon, if ever.
They could reap such a huge potential if they would license OS X.
With what Microsoft is doing with Windows they are opening a big window of opportunity for an alternative.
as much as we love our ipads at my house, in all honesty the only thing they’re good for is web browsing, email, facebook, reading books and controlling the Apple TV.
Judging by the astronomical quantity of people irrationally swearing by Mac OSX machines in the creative industry (books, photography, films, music recording, the list goes on…) and refuse to use anything but a specific brand of software (Adobe comes to mind) I won’t bet on Mac’s demise anytime soon.
But it will stale for a long while, and these people will tell you it’s the apocalypse and they can’t and won’t use anything else. Then the time will come and they will move on like always.
I won’t personally miss OSX, it was dreadful the first few versions, then pretty nice for a few more, and then it became a big mess for the last few.
I whish Apple’s IOS wasn’t so frozen in time, it’s like they are keeping it from evolving to keep that Jobs mojo in there, it’s silly.
We’ve been reading about “the demise of OS X” for a long time. It’s turning into a “year of Linux on the desktop” type of story. Personally, I can see several things coming together to cause the situation we’re now seeing.
The smartphone gave tech companies the opportunity to re-invent the personal computer for the 21st century: get rid of the old desktop metaphor, make it simpler and more secure. It’s locked down and limited yes, but for a lot of people that’s enough. Even some tech-savvy users gravitate towards the iPad because it let’s them do all the work they need without the added size and complexity of a desktop or laptop. Being a developer I don’t see myself ever working on an iPad. I’m simply too attached to my bash prompt. So while I think we need to get used to the idea of smartphones and tablets as a new kind of computer platform, traditional computers are still going to be needed for many tasks including development and simply learning how computers work. (YouTuber Tom Scott says it much better in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNm-b1UXGTY )
Then we have the general stagnation in the PC market, both on the hardware and software side. Nothing much exciting happens anymore. Gone are the bold old days of the early iMacs and iBooks. We’ve gone from revolutionary design to evolutionary design to what I’d call simple convergence ^aEUR“ ever more minute changes to the same core design. Gone are also the days when a computer would start feeling outdated the moment you bought it. Unless you’re a gamer or work with especially demanding software, even a cheap computer will last you many years. If there’s something to be excited over then it’s the fact that computers now are getting smaller and cheaper.
On the OS side we see a slow trickle of random and largely unnecessary features to try and convince users to upgrade. You don’t really miss that much by sticking to an older OS (except a few important security fixes). The desktop metaphor is long since forgotten ^aEUR“ now it’s just the computer desktop. Things get added or shuffled around without regards to consistency and intuitivity. At the same time, a lot of people will have spent one or two decades with the computer desktop and have gotten used to the way it works. Any big change will be met with a huge backlash ^aEUR“ Windows 8, Gnome Shell, Ubuntu’s Unity^aEUR| So while I find it a bit alarming that Apple haven’t shaken things up on the Mac side in some years, as they have been wont to do, I see it as more of a general stagnation.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll go play with my Raspberry Pi 3.
I think boards like those will ultimately be where people learn how computers work. They’re built for that, and you can learn more from them because of it than you can in the same amount of time from, for example, a laptop that is essentially a sealed unit these days. It’s almost a revision of how things were before I was born, at least looking at it from my perspective. People learned on boards, now we’re drifting back to that. Major difference is, obviously, that they don’t have to build their own boards anymore.
Speaking of: I think it’s about time I got me one.
logical fail here — iOS is OS X. It’s a smaller, lighter, touch-based version, but it’s the same plumbing.
A technicality. They’re not talking about the low level and you know it.
It’s not a technicality. iOS depends on OSX, period. There is no incentive for Apple to dump OSX, mainly because the Mac is still a fairly profitable division.
The only thing I got from this clickbait post is that Thom does not know anybody with authority inside Apple.
If Apple would let me run XCode on iOS to build apps for iOS I would switch my current Mac Mini development machine to iPad Pro for sure. However I cannot see this happening.
So as PC-s will remain to be used for content creation, the Macs and OS X will be used the same. Consumers however will probably abandon their Macs.
Oh and of course decent enterprise grade dock would be needed to transition over to iPads so that I could attach my big display and full size keyboard and mouse. Although the latter two can connect wirelessly at home but at work I would prefer wires attached to the dock.
Even Android makes circles around iOS in terms of productivity: it has had proper mouse support for years, ability to run parts of apps as background services and the incoming version will add windows as well. I tried to use company iPad as a remote terminal – it was a very frustrating experience due to lack of real multitasking and mouse support in particular. At the moment is is merely a toy OS for content consumption and forms filling.
Edited 2016-03-22 15:34 UTC
Hardly. It crashes too much and is far too vulnerable to security hacks. Add on top of that the different device manufacturers and spotty app performance as a result, and productivity on Android? Forget it. Android could be the productivity powerhouse of mobile, but it most certainly is not anywhere close yet. At least iOS is consistent. Having to search for something because Motorola puts it here, Samsung puts it there, and this app works like this on HTC but like this on Nexus sends productivity down the toilet.
For mobile devices I prefer Android for a variety of reasons but I have 2 imacs (21.5 and 27) and was planning on purchasing a next gen model (hoping for a larger screen like 30″). We use our iMacs for general computing, netflix, Google Docs, Photo and Video editing, DVD Creation, music creation/playing,…
All things that just don’t work for us on iPads,…
Well, we don’t know that Macs are doomed. I, like Thom, think the writing is on the wall but I don’t see it happening for many years yet. iOS still has many areas that need attention before Apple will contemplate it. From the business standpoint though, gradually shifting their concentration to iOS makes sense and, should they fill in the gaps for power users, a gradual complete transition is probably what will happen. They will have to do something about larger screens for those who need them of course and, along with that, will have to have a different input method other than direct touch while using those big boys. File management needs to be bumped up big time, too, without breaking the sandboxing model. Are we there yet? Not by a long shot. I suspect, however, that we’ll get there sooner than most tech-oriented people suspect. Where iPads are now crept up on me from behind. Where they’ll be in another five years? Well, I’m looking forward to seeing it.
Everyone can devote their Mac OS X money to Aeon and the X1000 now, right? Amiga OS 4.0 could be the future!
Oh, man yes! 1990 software technology, at 1980 prices, in 2020. Bulletproof business model!!!
Until there is some way to create iOS apps that don’t involve OSX, Apple can’t kill it.
That being said, I’m wondering if they couldn’t port XCode to a robust Linux, say something like Fedora. There’s UNIX under the hood for OSX already. I use several different Linuxes, and only mention Fedora because the Firefox people I was working with on FirefoxOS (RIP) used it and I read that that is Linus’s preferred environment.
Port Xcode to Linux when they can make a profit on Macs? Not bloody likely. It’s not a stable enough target anyway, and Next/OS X has evolved so far away from its UNIX base that they’d have to port everything over from the ground up. It’s not like OS X is X11 with a standard toolkit. Porting to Linux would be a rewrite, just like a Windows port would. Either that or they’d have to adopt GNUStep and bring it completely up to speed which might be even more of a headache.
Good to know. Thanks!
Now I’ll go back to speculating on how Android can be compiled on Android ….
Think different:
Until there is some way to create iOS that doesn’t involve OS X, Apple can’t kill it.
…squarely at WINDOWS computers. Take note of Cook’s comment about how sad it was that the average WINDOWS PC was 5 years old. This says nothing about the future of OS X or Mac’s but rather that Apple feels a lot of Windows users would be happy with an iPad Pro. I think this could be true to a sizable segment of them that mainly use their computer for email and Facebook, etc…
From Apple perspective, which user feels the need to upgrade their 4-5 year old laptop/desktop? Most still run decently todays software (granted the average size of the screen back then was HD at best).
Maybee their big ideea with a bigger iPad will pay off in the end because otherwise they do not have any better alternatives..
It’s either this or Microsoft / Google promoting their run everywhere OS type of thing. Only difference is that Apple bases their marketing and decision on actual economical situation while Microsoft / Google hope that people will enjoy doing this…
Cat and mouse game all over again.
Edited 2016-03-23 17:01 UTC
If the end of OS X came that would mean the end of their laptops and desktops. That makes no sense, especially since iOS is a more walled and limited version of OS X.
That it may stagnate? Yeah. But they’d be insane to phase it out, or to make their laptops run OSX like iOS. It’s just not a practical use case for laptops. That would be a worse outcry than full screen only start menu on Windows.
This has got to be one of the idiotic articles I’ve seen in awhile
And Mercedes and Paccar, etc., are going to stop building semi trucks? And Ford, GMC, Dodge, etc., are going to stop building pickups?
Just because you like idevices (and I do too) does NOT mean that Apple is going to stop making desktop/laptop computers. Even if iOS can technically do everything that desktop/laptop computers can, they don’t have the RAM needed to do many, many, many things.
And the hardware in Apple laptop/desktop computers will NOT be sitting still. As time goes on they will continue to outpace iDevices (again, which I love too) when it comes to RAM and storage capacity. Now some laptops will be limited but others like the Pro models will be expected to do pro things and will have more RAM and storage. You just can’t replace that with a tablet until those are the same.
I used to love Mac’s when they were Power based and they made really nice UNIX RISC workstations. Apple wooed lots of UNIX nerds over. Then they discovered how much money they could make from music and video sales and associated consumption devices. Honestly..more power to them.
So they shifted focus from building great computing devices to building devices that sell music and videos.
OSX isn’t going to sell as many music tunes. It’s already a second class citizen. I’ve seen a number of UNIX nerds that’ve gone back to other O/S and hardware configs as OS-X is less geared towards the types of jobs they do on computers for the price. Sure.. some stayed, but I and a lot of others left.
So.. I’m not surprised to see OS-X relegated to a third class citizen. They have to do the things that earn them the most.
Myself and the vast majority of web developers tend to use OSX as a glorified Unix. I don’t use a single one of the built-in apps. Almost all my dev tools are cross platform, and run on Linux. I don’t use an iPhone or iPad so all of those buggy bluetooth integrations won’t be missed.
So yeah, I could move to Linux without skipping a beat. I would miss the top-flight hardware however.