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> It's crazy to develop very similar APIs for GUI apps in parallel, and what has become two different OSs with slightly different apps and feature sets, but a h

> It's crazy to develop very similar APIs for GUI apps in parallel, and what has become two different OSs with slightly different apps and feature sets, but a huge amount of overlap. The savings for Apple and developers of having a consistent set of new APIs and one set of apps to manage (for example their entire office suite) would be huge. Right, and what the announcement seems to show is that UIKit could eventually grow to replace AppKit. Like you yourself say - "uikit is a better appkit written with the benefit of experience". That still doesn't imply the two OS would necessarily be merged - there's still a ton of things that make sense for macOS that are not needed in iOS, and vice versa - just for one thing, they have vastly different energy budgets. There's also a ton of overlap and shared code already, for pieces that it does make sense to share. So, I still think the answer is really targeted at people who fear that iOS (with all of its current limitations) will replace macOS, essentially, rather than being a misdirection as you seem to find it?

grey-area 8y ago
From a customer perspective, there may be two OSs - that's really a marketing question. From a developer perspective, I expect them to arrive at one API, with a few options to allow feedback from various sources (tap or click), and handling multiple screen sizes gracefully, and therefore pretty much one OS, so that you can build one app across devices - this is exactly what they are trying out with their ios app port. Once you do that, it doesn't make sense to have two APIs. I can't think of many features that would be exclusive - to take your example of energy budgets, saving energy on both is equally important now that laptops are a mainstay and desktops an afterthought. We may well see ARM laptops for this reason. Watches are the one exception that have a budget so tight at present that normal apps just aren't feasible. So I think a merge is exactly what is on the cards in the long term, particularly as they are now run by an operations person and the money flows in more and more from phones, not computers.

grey-area 8y ago

From a customer perspective, there may be two OSs - that's really a marketing question. From a developer perspective, I expect them to arrive at one API, with a few options to allow feedback from various sources (tap or click), and handling multiple screen sizes gracefully, and therefore pretty much one OS, so that you can build one app across devices - this is exactly what they are trying out with their ios app port. Once you do that, it doesn't make sense to have two APIs. I can't think of many features that would be exclusive - to take your example of energy budgets, saving energy on both is equally important now that laptops are a mainstay and desktops an afterthought. We may well see ARM laptops for this reason. Watches are the one exception that have a budget so tight at present that normal apps just aren't feasible. So I think a merge is exactly what is on the cards in the long term, particularly as they are now run by an operations person and the money flows in more and more from phones, not computers.