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> I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon Seems unlikely. From a 2016 interview: > MacOS is meant to be operated with a mouse and keyb

> I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon Seems unlikely. From a 2016 interview: > MacOS is meant to be operated with a mouse and keyboard. Apple says it doesn’t make sense to lean forward to touch your Mac screen. An iOS-powered iPad works best with fingers, which means you can just lean back while using it. > “We did spend a great deal of time looking at this a number of years ago and came to the conclusion that to make the best personal computer, you can’t try to turn MacOS into an iPhone,” Schiller says. “Conversely, you can’t turn iOS into a Mac…. So each one is best at what they’re meant to be — and we take what makes sense to add from each, but without fundamentally changing them so they’re compromised.” --https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/does-the-mac-still-matter/ https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/does-the-mac-still-matt...

jpetso 8y ago
Well, they have the iPad Pro with keyboard cover already. Who's to say that they couldn't make that into an actual laptop product, replacing their lower-end macOS devices? Also, none of your quotes mention the impossibility of making an iOS device with yet another different form factor. It merely says that they won't merge the two OSes. Plus, even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be the first time that Apple went back on a public statement while rebranding the backtracking as the invention of a whole new computing paradigm.
- dm319 8y ago
  not an apple user, but can you get unix commandline tools on iOS like you can with termux on Android?
  - kgc 8y ago
    Yes.
empath75 8y ago
Actions speak louder than words. They’ve barely done anything with macOS in years.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Change for no good reason (Windows 8?) is worse than little change (APFS, minor updates). My Gnome desktop is basically unchanged for a good couple major releases of Linux and I'm still very happy with it.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Yes, the things I want from an OS in order of priority are security fixes, bug fixes, support for new hardware, performance improvements, usability enhancements then finally new features.
rosege 8y ago
If only MS had realised this when releasing Server 2012 - I remember how awful that was because they had tried to do a touch interface on a server. Things have improved quite a bit but its still a mess
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Touch UI on a server? What were they smoking?!
  - dagw 8y ago
    The theory, as explained by a Microsoft employee at the time, was that you would be remoting in with your tablet from wherever you happened to and thus needed a touch interface.
    - bonesss 8y ago
      I would like to explain to that techie how remote desktop connections work, and what full-screen refreshes do over poor connections... Not to mention the joys of having "kill this production server" buttons right next to "important app" buttons when working through daisy-chained remote sessions onto low-resolution desktops...
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        MS always had the funny notion you'd need a GUI to manage your server. By now, I think it's mostly pride and an unwillingness to admit a good command line rules that scenario. And I'm not talking PowerShell here. That thing is more a scripting language than a shell.
FooHentai 8y ago
The split view of 'producer' vs 'consumer' often seems like a good yardstick for this kinda stuff, rather than high/low end. For situations where you want to be productive on a device, mouse and keyboard, desktop, big screen, proper seat all very important. For situations where someone consumes on a device, touch input, portability, small screen, headphones connectivity. That seems to match the philosophical split for MacOS vs IOS, and maybe future developments can be best predicted by applying that lens.
- ace_of_spades 8y ago
  A counter argument against this view, would be the heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people. Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture...
  - ikurei 8y ago
    > Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture. I would describe it more like a model. And yeah, those never capture the whole picture, and don't need to to be useful. > heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people. You can do creation of stuff on iPads, of course. I use it a lot as a very-portable writing machine. But still, I think that marketing was just... marketing. Every one wants to think of themselves as creators, and their kids to be doing things rather than watching YouTube, but still iPads are mostly used for consumption and are much better at it than at creation, except for a few jobs/hobbies. A better counter argument, for me, would be to just watch a non-technical person use a Windows PC. Many would be better served by a safer, simpler iOS on a 20-inch screen with an ok keyboard. We wouldn't, because we want a more-than-just-ok keyboard, and many windows, and bash, and a many-core CPU that is great at virtualization, and...
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      Infantalizing "non-technical users" just means you avoid creating new "technical users", does it not? If "we" all sit in our high and mighty many-core bastions, and leave the masses to shiny, locked down "consumption only devices" outside our gates while we look down upon them, we create a nice closed walled garden, certainly. But is that really the sort of class system we need?
FireBeyond 8y ago
They also said iPod would never do video... And that iPad would never do stylus... But Mac will never do touch, because they said so...?
- llampx 8y ago
  Exactly. The best way to take Apple is to take what they say is gospel... and ignore it completely. If you had listened to Apple, the iPhone would forever be small enough to operate one-handed, the iPad would never go above or below 10", etc etc. All of that was true until it happened, and suddenly it was the best thing ever.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  It seemed a pretty strong statement to me, compared to some off the cuff remark.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    "We don't ever see video in the iPod's future. Nobody wants to watch movies on that small a screen." "If you see a tablet, and it has a stylus, then somebody did it wrong." Fairly strong statements, too.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      Not as strong as stating they researched it and found it didn't work. Those sound like off the cuff remarks to me.
guelo 8y ago
It's such bullshit. I've done development work on touchscreen Windows laptops and it's very handy. Just the fact that you can touch the mobile simulators just like you touch real devices is super useful. And for some reason Apple has no problem having people lean in to touch their useless MacBook keyboard touchstrip thing. I don't know what they're smoking at Apple these days.
- lsadam0 8y ago
  I can understand how having a touchscreen helps with mobile development, but I have no use for touchscreen functionality in my development. I don't have a desire for my macbook to have a touchscreen at all. Further, I think the touch bar was a huge mistake. I've really gotta side with the idea of letting a desktop/laptop excel at being a computer rather than suffering from an identity problem. All that said, we all get to vote with our dollars :)
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Just because you don't have a use (today) doesn't mean that no one has a use for it, much less that you wouldn't find a use for it tomorrow. Touch on a laptop screen is a huge convenience, it's not a laptop identity problem. Sometimes tapping or scrolling a thing feels more natural, even on a laptop, even on any other screen that you own. Apple has used that very logic in their own marketing of the iPhone and iPad, that touching things is the more natural feel, that directly interacting with things on the screen is quite natural. To a child growing up with iPhones and iPads, a screen without touch is "broken". For an adult me, switching between a Windows laptop with touch to a macOS laptop without one takes a bit of mental gymnastics because I keep wanting to just tap the shiny icons to do things and I get briefly confused why the screen is broken when I try to touch them. I don't care how good you think a trackpad is, it's still sometimes faster to reach up and poke something with your pointer finger than track a pointer the long journey over to a thing. It's a nice convenience to have touch on the screen and do it directly. Maybe that convenience doesn't interest you, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that convenience doesn't exist. (Plus, when you get into differently abled people you start to find people that that convenience starts to matter a lot more for their day-to-day happiness.)
hvidgaard 8y ago
I've used touch enabled laptops for quite a while, and it's absolutely a good interface for many things I do as a developer. I'm sure I'm not going to use it on my desktop machine because the screens are about 1m away from me.
askvictor 8y ago
2016 is a long time ago in tech terms. Given that they've just announced that iOS apps are coming to OSX, I would be very surprised if touch-screen Macbooks aren't on the way.

jpetso 8y ago

Well, they have the iPad Pro with keyboard cover already. Who's to say that they couldn't make that into an actual laptop product, replacing their lower-end macOS devices? Also, none of your quotes mention the impossibility of making an iOS device with yet another different form factor. It merely says that they won't merge the two OSes. Plus, even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be the first time that Apple went back on a public statement while rebranding the backtracking as the invention of a whole new computing paradigm.

dm319 8y ago
not an apple user, but can you get unix commandline tools on iOS like you can with termux on Android?
- kgc 8y ago
  Yes.

empath75 8y ago

Actions speak louder than words. They’ve barely done anything with macOS in years.

rbanffy 8y ago
Change for no good reason (Windows 8?) is worse than little change (APFS, minor updates). My Gnome desktop is basically unchanged for a good couple major releases of Linux and I'm still very happy with it.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Yes, the things I want from an OS in order of priority are security fixes, bug fixes, support for new hardware, performance improvements, usability enhancements then finally new features.

rosege 8y ago

If only MS had realised this when releasing Server 2012 - I remember how awful that was because they had tried to do a touch interface on a server. Things have improved quite a bit but its still a mess

Rjevski 8y ago
Touch UI on a server? What were they smoking?!
- dagw 8y ago
  The theory, as explained by a Microsoft employee at the time, was that you would be remoting in with your tablet from wherever you happened to and thus needed a touch interface.
  - bonesss 8y ago
    I would like to explain to that techie how remote desktop connections work, and what full-screen refreshes do over poor connections... Not to mention the joys of having "kill this production server" buttons right next to "important app" buttons when working through daisy-chained remote sessions onto low-resolution desktops...
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      MS always had the funny notion you'd need a GUI to manage your server. By now, I think it's mostly pride and an unwillingness to admit a good command line rules that scenario. And I'm not talking PowerShell here. That thing is more a scripting language than a shell.

FooHentai 8y ago

The split view of 'producer' vs 'consumer' often seems like a good yardstick for this kinda stuff, rather than high/low end. For situations where you want to be productive on a device, mouse and keyboard, desktop, big screen, proper seat all very important. For situations where someone consumes on a device, touch input, portability, small screen, headphones connectivity. That seems to match the philosophical split for MacOS vs IOS, and maybe future developments can be best predicted by applying that lens.

ace_of_spades 8y ago
A counter argument against this view, would be the heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people. Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture...
- ikurei 8y ago
  > Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture. I would describe it more like a model. And yeah, those never capture the whole picture, and don't need to to be useful. > heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people. You can do creation of stuff on iPads, of course. I use it a lot as a very-portable writing machine. But still, I think that marketing was just... marketing. Every one wants to think of themselves as creators, and their kids to be doing things rather than watching YouTube, but still iPads are mostly used for consumption and are much better at it than at creation, except for a few jobs/hobbies. A better counter argument, for me, would be to just watch a non-technical person use a Windows PC. Many would be better served by a safer, simpler iOS on a 20-inch screen with an ok keyboard. We wouldn't, because we want a more-than-just-ok keyboard, and many windows, and bash, and a many-core CPU that is great at virtualization, and...
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Infantalizing "non-technical users" just means you avoid creating new "technical users", does it not? If "we" all sit in our high and mighty many-core bastions, and leave the masses to shiny, locked down "consumption only devices" outside our gates while we look down upon them, we create a nice closed walled garden, certainly. But is that really the sort of class system we need?

FireBeyond 8y ago

They also said iPod would never do video... And that iPad would never do stylus... But Mac will never do touch, because they said so...?

llampx 8y ago
Exactly. The best way to take Apple is to take what they say is gospel... and ignore it completely. If you had listened to Apple, the iPhone would forever be small enough to operate one-handed, the iPad would never go above or below 10", etc etc. All of that was true until it happened, and suddenly it was the best thing ever.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
It seemed a pretty strong statement to me, compared to some off the cuff remark.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  "We don't ever see video in the iPod's future. Nobody wants to watch movies on that small a screen." "If you see a tablet, and it has a stylus, then somebody did it wrong." Fairly strong statements, too.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Not as strong as stating they researched it and found it didn't work. Those sound like off the cuff remarks to me.

guelo 8y ago

It's such bullshit. I've done development work on touchscreen Windows laptops and it's very handy. Just the fact that you can touch the mobile simulators just like you touch real devices is super useful. And for some reason Apple has no problem having people lean in to touch their useless MacBook keyboard touchstrip thing. I don't know what they're smoking at Apple these days.

lsadam0 8y ago
I can understand how having a touchscreen helps with mobile development, but I have no use for touchscreen functionality in my development. I don't have a desire for my macbook to have a touchscreen at all. Further, I think the touch bar was a huge mistake. I've really gotta side with the idea of letting a desktop/laptop excel at being a computer rather than suffering from an identity problem. All that said, we all get to vote with our dollars :)
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Just because you don't have a use (today) doesn't mean that no one has a use for it, much less that you wouldn't find a use for it tomorrow. Touch on a laptop screen is a huge convenience, it's not a laptop identity problem. Sometimes tapping or scrolling a thing feels more natural, even on a laptop, even on any other screen that you own. Apple has used that very logic in their own marketing of the iPhone and iPad, that touching things is the more natural feel, that directly interacting with things on the screen is quite natural. To a child growing up with iPhones and iPads, a screen without touch is "broken". For an adult me, switching between a Windows laptop with touch to a macOS laptop without one takes a bit of mental gymnastics because I keep wanting to just tap the shiny icons to do things and I get briefly confused why the screen is broken when I try to touch them. I don't care how good you think a trackpad is, it's still sometimes faster to reach up and poke something with your pointer finger than track a pointer the long journey over to a thing. It's a nice convenience to have touch on the screen and do it directly. Maybe that convenience doesn't interest you, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that convenience doesn't exist. (Plus, when you get into differently abled people you start to find people that that convenience starts to matter a lot more for their day-to-day happiness.)

hvidgaard 8y ago

I've used touch enabled laptops for quite a while, and it's absolutely a good interface for many things I do as a developer. I'm sure I'm not going to use it on my desktop machine because the screens are about 1m away from me.

askvictor 8y ago

2016 is a long time ago in tech terms. Given that they've just announced that iOS apps are coming to OSX, I would be very surprised if touch-screen Macbooks aren't on the way.