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I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that iOS could replace macOS any time soon. Here's an experiment if you don't believe me: grab a mac, run the iOS emulator on

I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that iOS could replace macOS any time soon. Here's an experiment if you don't believe me: grab a mac, run the iOS emulator on it full-screen and try to do all your normal tasks in the emulator, without jumping out to the desktop. Let me know how that feels after a few hours. You could argue that with some engineering time they can add some affordances to the iOS interface to make it more pleasant on desktop. Sure. But every app is also going to need to adapt for this -- they need to drag along the entire ecosystem. Honestly it would be way easier to make macOS run on ARM than it would be to make iOS run on desktop. They already did this whole processor shift thing once and it worked out just fine. Just package things in universal binaries and emulate the old CPU for legacy software. Not to mention with something like LLVM it's not crazy to imagine distributing applications in a near-native bytecode that gets JIT'd to the target machine. I know microsoft has gotten pretty close to accomplishing the entire one-os-for-everything model, but look how much time and money it's taken them, and the amount of good will they burned through getting there.

Tloewald 10y ago
What does this have to do with anything? Mac OS is totally portable (at one point. OpenStep provided transparent support for four CPU architectures), and server-side software even more so. Similarly, Apple could presumably port whatever subsets of Mac OS are needed as the mood takes them.
- acdha 10y ago
  It wasn't that long ago that a universal binary on OS X meant four architectures: 32 and 64-bit for both PowerPC and Intel processors. That part of the Mach binary format worked quite well as most people never even noticed.
- Esau 10y ago
  I remember the Nextstep/Openstep days, as I owned a used NextStation. IIRC, those were called quadfat binaries.
- overgard 10y ago
  I never said macOS wasn't portable, so I'm not sure what you're getting at? My point is that iOS would suck on desktop without a lot of work, and a lot of that work would fall on app developers, not just apple.
  - swombat 10y ago
    overgard's point is that you wouldn't run iOS on the desktop, you'd run macOS there, but on chips designed for mobiles (A*).
    - overgard 10y ago
      seems like a likely point for that overgard fellow
  - Tloewald 10y ago
    The article is saying that intel should be worried because Ax chips are competitive with their chips. Whether iOS is a good replacement for Mac OS is irrelevant. Mac OS can run on Ax chips with no significant effort from Apple and not much from third party developers.
fredfoobar42 10y ago
A lot of people forget, but iOS shares the same underpinnings as MacOS X. In fact, when Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, he didn't say it ran iPhone OS, he said it ran MacOS. I wouldn't be surprised if there's macOS already ready to go for ARM, much like there was an Intel MacOS for years before the transition was announced. As for whether iOS could replace macOS, if you go back to my first point, think about iOS as a version of macOS that was stripped down and has been built back up over the intervening decade. I don't think they could make the switch tomorrow, but in a couple of years, it's not unreasonable to think there could be a reunification of the iOS and macOS codebases, creating, essentially a fully-featured iOS for desktop hardware with the features we've come to expect from modern desktop OSes.
Esau 10y ago
My wife was commenting the other day, when she noticed a photo of the iPad Pro 12 with the Smart Keyboard, that Apple should make a touchscreen laptop that would let people install either Mac OS or iOS. I don't personally know if such a device would be accepted but there are some people interested in such a device. Personally, I prefer they keep Mac OS and iOS separate.
nattofriends 10y ago
They already did the processor shift thing twice.

Tloewald 10y ago

What does this have to do with anything? Mac OS is totally portable (at one point. OpenStep provided transparent support for four CPU architectures), and server-side software even more so. Similarly, Apple could presumably port whatever subsets of Mac OS are needed as the mood takes them.

acdha 10y ago
It wasn't that long ago that a universal binary on OS X meant four architectures: 32 and 64-bit for both PowerPC and Intel processors. That part of the Mach binary format worked quite well as most people never even noticed.
Esau 10y ago
I remember the Nextstep/Openstep days, as I owned a used NextStation. IIRC, those were called quadfat binaries.
overgard 10y ago
I never said macOS wasn't portable, so I'm not sure what you're getting at? My point is that iOS would suck on desktop without a lot of work, and a lot of that work would fall on app developers, not just apple.
- swombat 10y ago
  overgard's point is that you wouldn't run iOS on the desktop, you'd run macOS there, but on chips designed for mobiles (A*).
  - overgard 10y ago
    seems like a likely point for that overgard fellow
- Tloewald 10y ago
  The article is saying that intel should be worried because Ax chips are competitive with their chips. Whether iOS is a good replacement for Mac OS is irrelevant. Mac OS can run on Ax chips with no significant effort from Apple and not much from third party developers.

fredfoobar42 10y ago

A lot of people forget, but iOS shares the same underpinnings as MacOS X. In fact, when Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, he didn't say it ran iPhone OS, he said it ran MacOS. I wouldn't be surprised if there's macOS already ready to go for ARM, much like there was an Intel MacOS for years before the transition was announced. As for whether iOS could replace macOS, if you go back to my first point, think about iOS as a version of macOS that was stripped down and has been built back up over the intervening decade. I don't think they could make the switch tomorrow, but in a couple of years, it's not unreasonable to think there could be a reunification of the iOS and macOS codebases, creating, essentially a fully-featured iOS for desktop hardware with the features we've come to expect from modern desktop OSes.

Esau 10y ago

My wife was commenting the other day, when she noticed a photo of the iPad Pro 12 with the Smart Keyboard, that Apple should make a touchscreen laptop that would let people install either Mac OS or iOS. I don't personally know if such a device would be accepted but there are some people interested in such a device. Personally, I prefer they keep Mac OS and iOS separate.

nattofriends 10y ago

They already did the processor shift thing twice.