16 ms·

Unifying iPadOS and macOS

120 points by fallenhitokiri 5y ago

defaulty 5y ago
As a power user on MacOS, I dread the merge. I can only suspect that MacOS becomes less power-user friendly in the name of "intuitiveness". I hope I am proven wrong
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  It's just lazyness / QA problems at Apple that prevent high quality apps
  - bluescrn 5y ago
    No, it's more about the inherent limitations of touch-centric UIs, combined with limited multitasking (full-screen apps), and trying to hide the filesystem from the user.
    - aikinai 5y ago
      The file system hasn’t been hidden for years. Unfortunately the app and components that interact with it are completely anemic, so it’s still a pain to work with.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    Maybe they just can't afford QA? Shareholders are demanding sometimes, but end-users aren't mostly.
    - jbverschoor 5y ago
      Apple can afford anything in the world, except degrading quality / reputation.
    - bonestormii_ 5y ago
      LoL @ "Perhaps Apple can't afford..."
      - still_grokking 5y ago
        There really should be some syntax for jokes on the internet. Only one laugh I've got for this one…
    - FredPret 5y ago
      Apple can afford a small country, and shareholders will certainly support an Apple management that insists on adequate QA.
- SomeHacker44 5y ago
  I saw this coming in '19 or earlier when they deprecated 32-bit software. I started moving away from Apple then. Now I still have my functioning 2017 Mac but I mostly use newer Windows/WSL computers, and my new work computer is an X1 running Linux. It is not hard to switch except for the lack of emacs keys for cursor control. (Unix user since '88.)
- tomjen3 5y ago
  I agree. My personal plan is to ride it out and then maybe find a machine that works well with Linux. I can't go back to Windows unless MS rereleases Win7. Win10 is crap and win11 appears to be more of the same kind (i.e even worse). More to the point, this seems to be a general trend: we have so much better technology by now, but a worse society. That is something I don't know how to get out of.
- eddieh 5y ago
  > I can only suspect that MacOS becomes less power-user friendly That's pretty much been the trend for years now.
flohofwoe 5y ago
It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved inside an ecosystem that's optimized for passive media consumption and online shopping though.
- Glide 5y ago
  Counterpoint to this, is that I’ve seen people be reluctant to click where they are not reluctant to touch. That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Here’s one question: hover on focus vs click to focus? Hover makes sense if you think of the pointer as a finger.
  - mhuffman 5y ago
    >That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Who are you talking about? Senior citizens? Or maybe people outside of the US in developing countries? Because anyone under 50 in the US has grown up around tech.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      Don't just assume that default. Remember more than 10% of the US still doesn't have internet, and a shocking portion of the US has smartphones as their only method of computing and would be dumbfounded at a PC.
      - mhuffman 5y ago
        Yeah, I don't buy that, unless you are talking about the Amish or someone willfully avoiding technology. And in that case, we are not really losing "future techies" are we? Regarding the smartphone point, again, you might be talking about elderly people or self-isolated people. Otherwise all people under 50 have used computers in their school classes and would not be dumbfounded at a PC.
indymike 5y ago
It's no surprise that inexperienced computer users can get more done with a mobile UI than a MacOS (or for that matter, most classic computer UIs). The big difference is that to operate a mobile device, you don't have to be able to read and understand what the words mean. That doesn't mean a mobile UI is the right one for every laptop, or for a Macbook. We've seen many tries at unifying the design language between mobile and computer. ChromeOS, Windows 10, Android Desktop Mode, Ubuntu's Unity all are mobile/desktop UIs. What makes them work (to the extent they do work) is that most devices have touch screens (well, not so much with Android in desktop mode). Without the touch screen, optimizing the shape of UI components for touch is actually a bad experience as a pointing device works very differently than does a touch screen.
retskrad 5y ago
I think iPad is the one product that Apple is the most proud of and it shows. The 2021 iPad Pro is the most sophisticated product in Apple's lineup. It's the smoothest, fastest and most elegant software they have ever made. I know some people who used to work at Apple and they said it was clear that Apple wanted to let the Mac die and focus primarily on iPadOS and iOS but regular users and professionals kept buying Macs so they were forced to revert their attention to it again.
- john_minsk 5y ago
  I would argue that this is just "timing" thing. If we look far enough into the future I would bet that almost 100% of regular tasks should be done not only on iPad, but on iPhone. Human comes to work => docks/AirPlays their system to external monitor => does work in browsers/office apps. We are pretty close to this reality tbh. Mostly software is a limiting factor. As for computer pros...we probably will be forced to use some other vendors(sad) or use remote systems for compute tasks while using our phone/tablet as thin client. Thanks Apple for not jumping into that train just yet!
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    If they would put macOS on iPads or iPhones it could be a reality today, but I see no indication that iOS/iPadOS are going to be suitable for this any time soon.
  - fallenhitokiri 5y ago
    > Human comes to work => docks/AirPlays their system to > external monitor => does work in browsers/office apps. This sounds like Samsung DeX?
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      OQO had much of this working ~14 years ago, but I don't think it met much of the phone replacement functionality that it would have needed.
  - 5y ago
simonh 5y ago
It's amazing to me that Apple made a very strict distinction between touch UI systems and keyboard/mouse UI systems, right from the start, has maintained that rigorously, and has been right all along. Their competitors and the pundit-sphere saw this as a fatal weakness, but every attempt at unifying touch and keyboard/mouse interfaces failed miserably. So I'm not concerned about Apple trying to merge iPadOS and MacOS, because they already know it would be a mistake and are sticking to their guns until maybe our eyes and fingers get about 4x as sharp.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  What do you mean? iPadOS has keyboard and mouse support. Apple sells a first-party keyboard accessory for iPad.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Like the pencil these are for specific subsets of use cases, they are not a primary interaction mode but more like specialist support for optional peripherals, the same way desktops support graphics tablets and trackballs. When I described Mac interfaces as keyboard/mouse you didn't say "oh, and also graphics, tablets, trackballs and VR headsets". They're an edge case.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Yes... but it's still a very touch-focused system. The mouse support on iPad, you'll notice, has very little precision in where you click. It's a round dot like a finger - you can't precisely click a few pixels. They found a way to make a touchpad while keeping the touch focus.
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  Is it really amazing? Everyone has been saying the same from the start about wanting separate mobile and desktop UIs.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Microsoft's tablet strategy was literally to implement a touch first tablet UI in their desktop OS. Meanwhile loads of companies have been trying to merge desktop UI modes into phones since well before the iPhone. Check out Android desktop mode for a recent example. I remember loads of friends of mine for years telling me 'proper' desktop OSes in tablets would kill the iPad.
aj3 5y ago
You can hack macOS using macOS, but kids won’t be able to get that level of understanding how OS works on iPadOS. This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity. My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  Full app development and selling apps in the App Store is close to being released on the iPad. You can use SwiftUI right now in Playgrounds, but Apple has not released app generating functionality yet. It is a funny feeling working on the same Playground project on both an iPad and MacBook, but it works. The code for reading data files is a bit different, but the iPad dev experience will get better.
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    Playground isn’t close to full app development; it’s very powerful tool, but I don’t see many professionals jumping to build on that. Full app development is when Xcode and instruments are available.
    - mark_l_watson 5y ago
      Well, let's wait and see. Apple wants it to be easy for semi-technical people to write apps.
- mhuffman 5y ago
  >This is bad for IT. Maybe for how we do IT. But consider the future where 99% of apps are developed on a tablet or phone (for a tablet or phone) using a cloud web interface with mostly low-code or no-code widget drag and drops.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    There's a natural limit to what may be achieved with a low/no code tool. Kids might be able to drag a few elements on screen to create charts and games, but that sort of work doesn't really advance the field.
Fiahil 5y ago
The article does a good job summarizing what works on an iPad and what doesn't ! To that, I will add that iPads are designed as a "single user" device. Sharing one between family members means you have to let them use your Google, Spotify, iCloud accounts. Now that their hardware is all lined up between laptops and mobile devices, I fully expect the merge to happen in a few years. I feel Apple's software has been stagnant for too long and I won't be buying new hardware until then.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > I feel Apple's software has been stagnant for too long and I won't be buying new hardware until then. Odd. I'm still happy to use Mac OS High Sierra ... Yosemite even. I wonder with each OS release why I would even want the upgrade. Mainly because apps I use (Affinity, etc.) stop working (or stop trying to work) for older versions of Mac OS.
- criddell 5y ago
  > I will add that iPads are designed as a "single user" device. There are tools available to schools that allow multiple logins on a single iPad. It would be nice if they had something similar for families.
emsy 5y ago
In the article, 2 of 3 examples are about consumption. This just reinforces my opinion that the iPad is primarily a consumption device. My wife is a teacher and I asked her if her students, the so called „digital natives“ hold up to their reputation. She declined and said they were producing TikTok videos and instagram photos at best (which can lead to a creative career but I’d argue that’s the exception not the rule). Even if we improve productivity somewhat, it’s offset by a huge increase in consumption. I don’t see this changing in the near future, mainly because there are no incentives to do otherwise.
- fallenhitokiri 5y ago
  Author here - first of all: I agree. I should have gone a bit more into detail how „not sure how she’s related“ is using her devices. She is also doing actual work for school on the iPad (research and writing papers).
cwizou 5y ago
Interesting take, there's 0 doubt that iPads are incredibly more intuitive to use, and anecdotally, I've also seen the same observations regarding young and elderly. I think a good portion of that is the indirect pointing method (mouse or trackpad) that takes some use to, but there are certainly inherited conventions, features based on past limitations and other things that look just weird to a new audience picking it up. It's certainly not impossible but one could argue that some oddities could be cleaned up. Releasing software as dmg on Mac is really terrible for new users (and I hate that I did it for Aerial's companion app), it's inherited from the olden days of CD-ROMs and the fact that you have to unmount it is really something that could be improved on. Now, one could argue Apple has very low incentive to provide something better and push for a new norm (most software nowadays does zip and detect if user launches from the Downloads folder, complaining/moving the file in Applications for you), but that's definitely a relic of the past that, while you can still support it for legacy reasons, should be phased out for something better officially pushed by Apple (that is not just the App Store). The Apple approach to feature changes/simplifications on macOS though seems solely based on design. Hiding the document proxy icons on windows in Big Sur is a good example of this [1]. If you've seen Monterey betas, Safari tabs are also losing functionalities (favicons worked a bit like document proxy icons, that's gone now) and while they rolled back some of the most egregious changes (they had made a utter mess with toolbar buttons in beta 1), the new UI is still clunky in terms of general usability and readability. I guess it looks epurated and consistent with the new Safari iPad UI, but do those change help in any way the new users to get around the inherited "peculiarities" of the Mac ? I don't think so. And when Apple does "line up" features to make them consistent accross platforms, it's always the Mac that loses. The phasing out of plugins in Safari for app extensions killed uBlock Origin for example, and the alternatives are certainly not as great. [1] : https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_macos_11_and_12 https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_maco...
- joshtynjala 5y ago
  Have you tried creating a .pkg file instead of .dmg? Much better user experience, in my opinion. The developer controls where the .app goes, and there’s nothing for the user to unmount when finished.
PaulHoule 5y ago
Talk to a CS professor and they will tell you an OS is what is deep inside the machine but not see. Read a review in arstechnica and you would think an OS is about appearances and the exact shape of each UI component, etc. My understanding is that the kernel is basically the same already, it is the services stacked on top that are different.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  iOS always ran a stripped down XNU/Darwin based on the original CMU Mach blueprint. Right from the first version. For a fact, Steve Jobs mentioned that in his iPhone introduction keynote in 2007
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's completely practical to ship the (almost) same kernel with different a different userspace. That's the difference between desktop Linux and Android, XBOX and Windows, etc. In fact if you care about performance and reliability (particularly add more cores and get more performance) there is no option rather than build on a mature kernel. Google's Fuchsia, for instance, is a high risk project which might never reach parity with Android. (I think of Microsoft's "dual track" OS strategy that took 5 years to merge Windows 95 and Windows NT)
    - neilalexander 5y ago
      > Google's Fuchsia, for instance, is a high risk project which might never reach parity with Android. If you write an app using the Android APIs and not native code then it wouldn’t matter if you were really running a Linux-based Android or a Fuchsia-based Android, as long as the API contracts were met. Google knows this — it’s not impossible to imagine that one day Android might not be Linux-based.
      - PaulHoule 5y ago
        It's possible, but Google has to get all the details right to make it "good enough" if not better. For instance they have to get the story right w.r.t. to drivers and the needs of handset vendors, carriers, etc. Performance has to be good. Microkernel and capability-based systems are notorious for having bottlenecks. Personally I liked the original WSL from Microsoft a lot but Microsoft didn't feel it was good enough because filesystem metadata operations are much slower in Windows NT than they are in Linux. If you do something that involves an excessive number of files (say build the Linux kernel) some people find the performance of WSL unacceptable. Yet, nobody complained about the slowness of filesystem metadata operations before on Windows -- people figured that was just the way it was, might not even have known some operating system was faster, and they stuffed data in SQLLite and otherwise reduced the number of files that they handled. Microsoft felt they had to do something about it and came out with WSL2 which is inferior to WSL and to just running a normal Linux kernel under Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMWare and the like -- because it is still closely coupled to Windows in ways that make "it just works" elusive. (e.g. just requiring that you install it from the Windows Store means you can't install it if your Windows Store is b0rked, which mine often is) So Fuschia might be the future, but getting there involves confronting a lot of details that they might not want to confront. If there are ten critical "non-functional requirements" and they only get nine of them they are doomed.
grey-area 5y ago
IOS will replace Mac OS, the writing has been on the wall for a while now, iOS is where the money comes in and where most usage is, and maintaining dual development apis is painful and costly. Apple doesn’t need to rush this process, but it is inevitable IMO, and is foreshadowed by actions like allowing iOS apps to run on macOS, moving Mac OS closer in UI to mobile, adding essentials like file handling to the mobile os. At this point the underlying OS is the same, the UIs are converging, the UI frameworks for iOS are almost capable of replacing Mac OS, and it would be relatively easy to merge them in the next few years, keeping some extra layers of UI for macs but merging most of it and certainly the dev frameworks. We may see touchscreen macs or dockable iOS devices first though.
- np_tedious 5y ago
  Hmm. Seems likely in a way, but I don't see how to square this with the professional crowd like software devs
  - rewgs 5y ago
    The appearance of a trend does not guarantee the continuation of that trend to its logical extreme. I'd argue that they're just doing the obvious: refining and maturing iPadOS, and unifying the vibe of all their products. This makes sense. Just as one band influencing another doesn't mean that the two bands will eventually converge into an amorphous blob, two products by the same company influencing one another doesn't mean that the two will become a single product. I'd just take Apple's word for it that they've maintained all along: they're letting the device do its thing as best it can. If iOS were swallowing everything, then why did iPadOS split out into its own thing? People don't give enough credence to the fact that these platforms are splitting just as much as they're merging. Also, even if all devices were going the way of "dumbed-down iOS," someone still needs to develop for it, and you best believe that Apple won't loosen their grip on that segment. Just as Mac Pros are loss leaders just to keep the creative class, macOS devices in general will stick around, hell or high water, just to retain the developer class. I for one welcome the iPadOS-ification of macOS, the macOS-ification of iPadOS, and so on. They're just allowing the products to slowly evolve and (ideally) be the best version of what their interface dictates, just as they've always done and always said they're doing.
api 5y ago
I need a real computer. I don’t mind a few UI ideas being borrowed where they make sense but if I can’t run anything I want on it and can’t multitask or combine things together it is not a real computer. iOS works fine for a phone. It’s worthless for my job or my personal interests.
- criddell 5y ago
  That's kind of the beauty of an iPad. It isn't for everyone. It hasn't been designed as a lowest-common-denominator type of device. There are a few things it's great at and those aren't necessarily the types of things a lot of people want. I have a 2018 iPad and it's easily my favorite computer to use. With a keyboard, it's lovely to write on. With the Pencil and Good Notes it's a fantastic note taking device. Get ProCreate and it's an amazing combination for sketching and drawing. By itself, it's a great device for reference manuals and videos when I'm doing something like fixing my washing machine. I don't read much on it because I have a dedicated e-reader. I don't play games on it because I have a console that's better for gaming. I don't write software on it because I have a workstation and laptop configured exactly for that purpose. I think as they make changes to broaden the iPad's appeal, they may be undermining it.
  - api 5y ago
    I agree, and the same applies to the Mac and anything that narrows it. They are for different audiences.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    iPad is the same iOS like iPhone, just with bigger screen. It's not a real device for work. There's no bash in iPad. There's no docker in iPad. There's no accessible filesystem in iPad. You can't connect arduino and program it with iPad. You can't install Java IDE and use it. It's infinitely far away from being usable. And making it usable means turning it into macOS. The only possible way for iPad to become slightly useful is to provide a proper macOS in a some way. But it's still useless because of terrible thermals and will throttle on any serious load. Even laptops are barely able to keep up with ever increasing demands from developers. Tablet is just not made for work. It's good to read a book, that I'll admit. Even browser is barely usable, there's no developer console to kill that annoying div.
FractalHQ 5y ago
I bought an iPad Pro recently, and I hate the fact that I can’t run any of my favorite macOS apps on it despite the fact that the hardware is more than capable. And no web browsers / browser extensions / PWAs? It feels like a toy. Very disappointing.
- lostgame 5y ago
  Return it and get a MacBook for around the same price. I don’t understand the point of iPad Pros being so powerful when they can’t - y’know - run even Apple’s own Pro software. (Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro) They’re mind-numbingly expensive toys, for sure.
  - SomeHacker44 5y ago
    The only use I have for an iPad is Foreflight. If it ran on any other operating system I would not use Apple products. I dislike no fingerprint reader on the iPad Pro too. Still, it is nice for consuming books, blogs and video.
    - walterbell 5y ago
      The latest iPad Air has a fingerprint reader on the power button, which is nice. Hopefully this makes its way to other Apple devices.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    They make a lot of sense for creatives. ProCreate, various image editing tools, even video editing... I know a lot of talented professionals who've switched over to iPad Pros for most of their work except 3D. A large part of that is the Apple Pencil and very low latency, but they appreciate every spec bump because it does help their type of work out.
    - lostgame 5y ago
      >> they make a lot of sense for creatives I am a professional creative and use Apple’s software for that professional creativity, in the form of Logic Pro mainly as well as Final Cut. The iPad’s offerings of GarageBand and iMovie are about as useful for me with the work I do as ProCreate vs. MS Paint. No - the iPad isn’t good for ‘creatives’, it’s good for people who do digital visual art or design. That’s...for creatives? On a pro level? Honestly it. It is super shameful that Apple’s own Pro software won’t run on a device they are calling ‘Pro’.
tandav 5y ago
is macOS scans users data like iOS? (and reports to gov)
- lostgame 5y ago
  No it does not.
  - 130e13a 5y ago
    for now, that is
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  iOS does not do this.
- tehabe 5y ago
  macOS 12 will also scan uploads to iCloud and I'm pretty sure iMessage for minors will also have the backdoor active. So, macOS is as vulnerable as iOS.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
They can’t get rid of a general purpose OS. They have to have products that allow you to write software for the iDevices, and web applications, in general. You need macOS for these things.
- whatever1 5y ago
  Not really. They can set up cloud boxes for that (with pre-installed libraries and simulators) and let Microsoft, HP, Dell etc serve their beloved developers with crappy low-margin hardware. All the development goes to the cloud nowadays. The local machine will soon become irrelevant.
- danielrhodes 5y ago
  Virtualization. I have never needed to access the shell on my iPhone. But to do dev work I obviously need it on my Mac. But if you look at the rise of Docker and other such things, running stuff on the core OS is not always very optimal. It would be just as good to have a virtualized machine in whatever OS I want and be able to take that around with me. When I can have that, I don’t really care how locked down they make the OS as long as I can stay productive.
sangd 5y ago
iOS is undeniably the one that would lead and determine how the future would be. In terms of money, iOS makes almost 5x more money than MacOS excluding all the services and wearables the iOS brings in as well. It makes lots of sense to continue invest heavily on iPadOS to attract more advanced users like devs. iPad Pro M1 is the baby first step to start bringing in more MacOS compatible pieces to iPadOS. Eventually it would suck some or even most of the MacOS users into the iPadOS.
derefr 5y ago
Y’know Samsung’s DEX, where you plug a Samsung Android device into an HDMI output and the output is not a mirror of the phone’s mobile UI, but rather a full Android desktop UI? There’s little reason that Apple couldn’t do the same thing with iPads, where the “desktop UI” is macOS. Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around for you to plug your device into a monitor. Apple are already training us for this with the new version of Continuity — there’s little difference between “control your Mac from your iPad” and “control the macOS DE container running on your iPad, from your iPad.” The only real differences in interaction paradigm between Continuity and a DEX-like approach, now that I think of it, would be: - a shared filesystem - [possibly] moving iPad/Catalyst apps freely between screens, where they swap between being fullscreen on iPadOS and being windows on macOS This would also be a (rather-charitable) explanation for why iPadOS has never done anything smart so far when plugged into an HDMI display. If they were planning to do this, they wouldn’t bother with half-steps like giving iPadOS apps multi-display support.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Many people were expectantly waiting for this to be announced at WWDC 2021, especially with the M1-based iPad including silicon support for hypervisor/virtualization and the 16GB RAM / 1TB storage model. Yet nothing was announced, suggesting that the only use of 16GB RAM will be upcoming memory-consuming Adobe "Pro" apps.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    IMO this is the first future-proof mobile device from Apple. Apple has bad habit to install absolutely minimum amounts of RAM into their mobile devices. iPhone had 2 GB RAM when Androids (with similar price) had 8 GB RAM. It means that RAM will be main issue for supporting those devices in the future iOS versions and eventually they'll be dropped, despite extremely powerful CPU and huge storage. But with 16 GB it won't be the case ever. And, of course, CPU will not significantly progress in the future and certainly will not the limiting factor. So this tablet should easily last for another 10 years (if battery could be replaced with reasonable efforts).
tacker2000 5y ago
Maybe the future will be 90% of normal users using dumbed down touch devices, and the rest of us “power” users who need to develop stuff will be using a normal OS. Maybe the normal OSes that we all grew up with are actually overkill for these other users and they dont even want it. Why would they need a shell? Or the ability to install some arbitrary programs? They only need email and word and thats it. Maybe this is not a bad thing in the end? Who knows.
- lisper 5y ago
  It depends on whether you think computers should be tools for empowering people or subjugating them.
  - tacker2000 5y ago
    But isnt that too far fetched? Most people dont care about anything else than checking emails and playing candy crush. They dont think about empowerment or subjugation or changing the world.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      Even if it is not done daily, not being able to tinker with your system is fundamental. You don't have to be an expert yourself, but most computer users know someone with in-depth knowledge or just follow step-by-step instructions from the web or, imagine the concept, a computer book :) This allows a lot of control of your computing environment, you just don't get on an iPad.
    - lisper 5y ago
      Beware of self-fulfilling prophecies, especially this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It's sad that we can only think of touch screen interfaces as "dumbed down". The affordances of a touch-centric interface have yet to be fully explored; at least in principle, there's no reason why they could not be made just as capable as a keyboard+mouse.
gosukiwi 5y ago
Funny the author suggests defaulting to showing all apps as if it was mobile. Windows 8 tried that, didn't work out too well. I do think it would be great to unify though, maybe find a way to keep everyone happy. It would be great to just have an iPad (or any tablet device) and be able to just use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and be able to run any IDE, game, or app you want. As computers get more powerful, it might not even be necessary to have a full-blown desktop PC for regular personal use.
tehabe 5y ago
Depends on what you mean with unify? Apple locked up macOS more and more over the years and I guess or fear, it is just a question of time until you can no longer install apps outside the App Store. After that the difference between macOS and iOS is just the UI.
villgax 5y ago
appleOS
_ph_ 5y ago
There is a lot of reason for having different UIs to start with, between a tablet and a laptop or even a desktop computer. Though I think productivity could be better on the iPad in this regard too. But the very basic problem is file handling. It somehow seems to vary across apps. Some have local storage to themselves which is hidden from everyone, some have visible local storage, others support files/iCloud. While files can be cumbersome on its own, if at least all apps would share the data in a way accessible by files, it would be a start. Best example which keeps bugging me: music. I ripped my CDs into my iTunes library and consequently into Apple Music. Now, Apple Music decided to delete some of my tracks from its library. How to get them back? I even was able to put them into my iCloud drive, but there is no way to add music to your iPad this way. Is there any other way you can add tracks to Apple Music? Is there any way to cause iTunes, which still has all of them, to upload them to Apple Music again (never mention that I do need my Mac for that, destroying the notion of the iPad being stand-alone). Same situation with videos. How to copy videos from iCloud onto the iPad apps? And of course, none of these apps open something like an "open file" mechanism. I quite like my iPad Pro. But I never figured out, how to really "do" things with it. The only positive exception seems to be the "Working Copy" git client, which enables some apps to be used productively.
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  True, these things seems intentionally made complicated since they want to push Apple Music/TV subscriptions. If you still haven't figured it out, you can put iTunes music to your iPad. But it requires like ~$20/year subscription called iTunes Match. So yeah, you can't do it for free using their suggested methods.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    Well that is the point, I have the Apple Music subscription which includes iTunes Match. So that is, how my music all got into Apple Music in the first place. But later on, it deleted some tracks I cannot add back. At least for years now, I am looking for a way how to do it. The problems only started, after I subscribed to Apple Music.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
As long as I can still sideload the same applications on macOS - I'm OK with this. Even if it's only enabled on the macOS "side", having a unified OS on unified hardware would be huge step forward in my opinion. Having XCode on an iPad would be convenient as well - though it's not the only IDE I use and would still ultimately prefer a proper laptop/desktop form-factor for "serious" programming.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I've written about this before, in "The Mac and the iPad aren't meeting in the middle yet": https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html While I won't repeat myself too much, my basic point is that Apple sees iOS (and iPadOS) devices as application consoles and Macs as general purpose computers, and there is no good business case for changing that any time soon. The Venn diagram of "users likely to walk over such a drastic change to the Mac" and "users likely to spend boggling amounts of money on Apple hardware" is close to a perfect circle, and the accounting department would probably not be super keen on taking the bet that the increased service revenue from shoving all app sales through the App Store would make up for the last hardware sales. You need 15–30% of a hell of a lot of apps to make up for a single lost 16-inch MacBook Pro sale, let alone a Mac Pro. Furthermore: given all the radical changes Apple made to the Mac in 2020, that still feels like the "now or never" moment. I wrote back in April that "if M1 Macs and macOS Big Sur didn't lock us into an App Store-only world, it's pretty unlikely macOS Pismo Beach or whatever is going to." Well, it's a year later, and macOS Monterey still isn't. Maybe in a year or two macOS Fresno will come along and prove me wrong, but I'm pretty confident it won't. The flip side of this is that I don't think iPadOS is going to be opened up. I also wrote that I didn't think we would be able to run macOS apps on M1 iPad Pros the way we can run iOS apps on M1 Macs; that's holding true so far, too. I'll note here, though, that the Hacker News crowd has specific ideas about What Makes a Real Computer that I don't think are widely shared by the non-engineer crowd, and that honestly a lot of you don't have a clear idea of how much automation and app interoperability is possible within iOS's restrictions. I prefer using the Mac, in no small part because I've been using Unix for close to three decades, but it's startling how much I'm able to do on the iPad even with its current nerfball limitations. And, sure, the obvious objection is that "application console" is arbitrary, and it is. But isn't "game console" just as arbitrary? I mean, a PlayStation 5 has an 8-core CPU with 16GB of RAM; you can't develop software on it because Sony won't let you, full stop. We're more annoyed about that limitation being on the iPad because the arbitrariness feels more obvious, because we didn't buy the iPad "only" for gaming. But on a technical level, there's not a whole lot of difference. The linked article makes the prediction that Apple is going to be trying to drive more and more people to the iPad and away from the Mac. I don't buy that, simply because the evidence just doesn't support it. They have literally just reported the strongest quarter of Mac sales in the company's history. It's not just that they're moving to their own CPU architecture, it's that they're in the process of rolling out new industrial designs for the entire Mac lineup. This is not what you do if your business goal is to have Mac sales taper off! My feeling now remains the same as it did, er, all the way back in April: iPadOS and macOS are never going to merge. In the long run, there is going to be an operating system that replaces both of them, and the groundwork for that new OS is being laid out now. But it's not going to be here any time soon, and nobody (including me) should be making confident predictions about what that new OS will be -- what it will and won't do, what it will and won't allow, how locked down or open it will be.
canuckintime 5y ago
Another paradigm not often discussed is to keep iPadOS and macOS distinct but offer macOS as an app (hardware virtualized vm) on iPadOS. This is a similar transition to MS-DOS on Windows 95 (successful), Unix terminal on Mac OS X (successful) or Windows 8 desktop program in Windows 8 tablet Metro shell (unsuccessful). Most people just need MacOSX for 10% of their computing needs — that 10% is unique for most people though — and an iPad Pro able to access macOS when needed would be enough for peace of mind. On the flip side if Apple just added cellular and Apple Pencil support to the Mac (not even a touchscreen/pen supported screen; just Apple Pencil support for the trackpad) it would decimate sales of iPad Pro.
memetomancer 5y ago
I for one ain't bothered: It's clear to me that Apple needs tools to engineer these spectacular devices and there would be little or no sense to them designing away the power of MacOS and landing on a product range limited to simple consumption. Does anyone foresee a time where Apple migrates to something like Lenovo Laptops or Windows or some scraggly Linux desktop environment? Apple won't be losing these tools any time soon. At worst we might see dual mode macbooks that can be switched between MacOS and iOS paradigms. Above and beyond that fairly self-evident conclusion, there is plenty of room for more sophisticated interaction with iOS devices that maintain the basic interface but also provide extremely sophisticated data manipulation capabilities. Perhaps even more powerfully than our beloved UNIX shells - think something like AI assisted voice interaction where you can easily state a pipeline verbally: "take results from A that contain N and modify them by X and then sort them by I and make a graph and paste it to my document". (e.g., grep | sed | sort | gnuplot | paste >> example.doc) That sort of thing is potentially just a few iterations away and simultaneously more powerful and more useful than text mode pipes, if only for the fact that the user wouldn't be required to memorize thousands of cryptic flags/switches. The same interface could be used to string these directives together to form scripts and set jobs, etc. This isn't meant to be a specific prediction, by the way, just one glimpse into the idea space. There are so many good ideas that people haven't had yet... it just staggers the mind to consider the potential. I'm just skimming the surface but surely there are so many ways to marry the insanely intuitive discoverability of something like iOS with the equally awesome power of the UNIX philosophy. But it's up to us to find them, rather than get inflexible and grumbly and say it can't be done, or Apple is stupid, or whatever nonsense take you might jerk your knee towards ;)
- pininja 5y ago
  I’ve pretty excited for the day I can do my programming job on an iPad in addition to my laptop. Apple has captured the software engineering market very well. Even the Microsoft F# shop I worked at had Apple hardware on most desks running Parallels or Boot Camp, and the two jobs I’ve had since were standard-issue MacBook Pro. The pipeline you described reminds me of Apple Shortcuts - it’s easy and useful. Most recently I made a GIF out of a bunch of photos on my phone, which is a simple task that used to require a far from ideal app (ads, black-box that could be hiding analytics and tracking tasks).
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
If the latest iPhone chip is as powerful as the Intel chip used in MacBooks, why shouldn't I be able to connect a hdmi to usb c cable to my phone and get a full MacOS machine on the external display? (Like Samsung dex does this or so did Ubuntu phone from 2014-15?) Same question with Android phones and Chrome OS. What's the technical challenge? I feel the only reason Apple won't do it is because then instead of buying 2 to 3 devices, people would buy just one, which will hurt their revenue. (Doesn't explain why Google won't)
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now. The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be shifted to be the ones living in the emulation layer like Classic OS9 apps to eventually be removed completely. If you think I’m wrong, forget your own opinions and prejudices to iPad and walled garden computing and imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.
- warning26 5y ago
  Not necessarily disagreeing, but my key question here is: how will Apple handle lower-level development cases? It's not difficult to imagine a watered-down iPad XCode shipping, but what about the tooling they use to build iOS itself? After all, Apple has to use something to develop iOS, and I think it's unlikely they'd create a special in-house operating system for the exclusive use of their OS development teams that's totally different than what they ship to consumers.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Why are you assuming iPadOS wouldn’t support low-level development?
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    I'm sure that they could just use Linux for that. I wouldn't be surprised if they're using Linux right now.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      Almost all Apple engineers use Macs.
- CDSlice 5y ago
thrower123 5y ago
This was dumb when Windows 8 did it, and it remains dumb. Unifying an OS and it's GUI/UX layer across devices with fundamental differences like this gives you lowest denominator crap.
eddieh 5y ago
I see a bunch of posts about the iPad being a "consume" only device and that's totally totally wrong. I've had an iPad since day one, generation one and took notes with an aftermarket stylus. I used Keynote and OmniGraffle to make slideshows and diagrams. I even bought an Apogee JAM and was able to record my electric guitar in GarageBand and used several other apps for guitar effects and simulated amplification. My favorite was AmpKit+ [http://agilepartners.com/apps/ampkit/ http://agilepartners.com/apps/ampkit/]. The iPad is a great creator's device and has only improved with the Apple Pencil and other enhancements. That being said, if Apple keeps moving macOS towards iPadOS I'm out. The iPad is a complementary device as I use it. It can not replace a notebook computer and my notebook computer can not replace my desktop. There are definitely people that can get by with just an iPad or even just a smartphone, but I can't and will not. There are still many options for non-Apple notebooks and workstations and many more OS options too.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  To me the real question is if a machine running MacOS existed in a Surface-like form factor that had touchscreen and pen support would it be better than the iPad at the tasks you just described. I'm finding it harder and harder to justify that the divergence even needed to happen at all when more and more iPad users are just interacting with it via keyboard case and trackpad.
- swiley 5y ago
  You're always consuming someone else's software on it though. Being able to rip out and re-implement even parts of your OS gives you a radically different view of computers than the one you get from an OS that doesn't even let you write your own alarm clock.

As a power user on MacOS, I dread the merge. I can only suspect that MacOS becomes less power-user friendly in the name of "intuitiveness". I hope I am proven wrong

jbverschoor 5y ago
It's just lazyness / QA problems at Apple that prevent high quality apps
- bluescrn 5y ago
  No, it's more about the inherent limitations of touch-centric UIs, combined with limited multitasking (full-screen apps), and trying to hide the filesystem from the user.
  - aikinai 5y ago
    The file system hasn’t been hidden for years. Unfortunately the app and components that interact with it are completely anemic, so it’s still a pain to work with.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Maybe they just can't afford QA? Shareholders are demanding sometimes, but end-users aren't mostly.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    Apple can afford anything in the world, except degrading quality / reputation.
  - bonestormii_ 5y ago
    LoL @ "Perhaps Apple can't afford..."
    - still_grokking 5y ago
      There really should be some syntax for jokes on the internet. Only one laugh I've got for this one…
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Apple can afford a small country, and shareholders will certainly support an Apple management that insists on adequate QA.
SomeHacker44 5y ago
I saw this coming in '19 or earlier when they deprecated 32-bit software. I started moving away from Apple then. Now I still have my functioning 2017 Mac but I mostly use newer Windows/WSL computers, and my new work computer is an X1 running Linux. It is not hard to switch except for the lack of emacs keys for cursor control. (Unix user since '88.)
tomjen3 5y ago
I agree. My personal plan is to ride it out and then maybe find a machine that works well with Linux. I can't go back to Windows unless MS rereleases Win7. Win10 is crap and win11 appears to be more of the same kind (i.e even worse). More to the point, this seems to be a general trend: we have so much better technology by now, but a worse society. That is something I don't know how to get out of.
eddieh 5y ago
> I can only suspect that MacOS becomes less power-user friendly That's pretty much been the trend for years now.

flohofwoe 5y ago

It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved inside an ecosystem that's optimized for passive media consumption and online shopping though.

Glide 5y ago
Counterpoint to this, is that I’ve seen people be reluctant to click where they are not reluctant to touch. That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Here’s one question: hover on focus vs click to focus? Hover makes sense if you think of the pointer as a finger.
- mhuffman 5y ago
  >That barrier is vital for people who did not grow up with tech to interact and experiment with it. Who are you talking about? Senior citizens? Or maybe people outside of the US in developing countries? Because anyone under 50 in the US has grown up around tech.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Don't just assume that default. Remember more than 10% of the US still doesn't have internet, and a shocking portion of the US has smartphones as their only method of computing and would be dumbfounded at a PC.
    - mhuffman 5y ago
      Yeah, I don't buy that, unless you are talking about the Amish or someone willfully avoiding technology. And in that case, we are not really losing "future techies" are we? Regarding the smartphone point, again, you might be talking about elderly people or self-isolated people. Otherwise all people under 50 have used computers in their school classes and would not be dumbfounded at a PC.

indymike 5y ago

It's no surprise that inexperienced computer users can get more done with a mobile UI than a MacOS (or for that matter, most classic computer UIs). The big difference is that to operate a mobile device, you don't have to be able to read and understand what the words mean. That doesn't mean a mobile UI is the right one for every laptop, or for a Macbook. We've seen many tries at unifying the design language between mobile and computer. ChromeOS, Windows 10, Android Desktop Mode, Ubuntu's Unity all are mobile/desktop UIs. What makes them work (to the extent they do work) is that most devices have touch screens (well, not so much with Android in desktop mode). Without the touch screen, optimizing the shape of UI components for touch is actually a bad experience as a pointing device works very differently than does a touch screen.

retskrad 5y ago

I think iPad is the one product that Apple is the most proud of and it shows. The 2021 iPad Pro is the most sophisticated product in Apple's lineup. It's the smoothest, fastest and most elegant software they have ever made. I know some people who used to work at Apple and they said it was clear that Apple wanted to let the Mac die and focus primarily on iPadOS and iOS but regular users and professionals kept buying Macs so they were forced to revert their attention to it again.

john_minsk 5y ago
I would argue that this is just "timing" thing. If we look far enough into the future I would bet that almost 100% of regular tasks should be done not only on iPad, but on iPhone. Human comes to work => docks/AirPlays their system to external monitor => does work in browsers/office apps. We are pretty close to this reality tbh. Mostly software is a limiting factor. As for computer pros...we probably will be forced to use some other vendors(sad) or use remote systems for compute tasks while using our phone/tablet as thin client. Thanks Apple for not jumping into that train just yet!
- nicoburns 5y ago
  If they would put macOS on iPads or iPhones it could be a reality today, but I see no indication that iOS/iPadOS are going to be suitable for this any time soon.
- fallenhitokiri 5y ago
  > Human comes to work => docks/AirPlays their system to > external monitor => does work in browsers/office apps. This sounds like Samsung DeX?
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    OQO had much of this working ~14 years ago, but I don't think it met much of the phone replacement functionality that it would have needed.
- 5y ago

simonh 5y ago

It's amazing to me that Apple made a very strict distinction between touch UI systems and keyboard/mouse UI systems, right from the start, has maintained that rigorously, and has been right all along. Their competitors and the pundit-sphere saw this as a fatal weakness, but every attempt at unifying touch and keyboard/mouse interfaces failed miserably. So I'm not concerned about Apple trying to merge iPadOS and MacOS, because they already know it would be a mistake and are sticking to their guns until maybe our eyes and fingers get about 4x as sharp.

jakelazaroff 5y ago
What do you mean? iPadOS has keyboard and mouse support. Apple sells a first-party keyboard accessory for iPad.
- simonh 5y ago
  Like the pencil these are for specific subsets of use cases, they are not a primary interaction mode but more like specialist support for optional peripherals, the same way desktops support graphics tablets and trackballs. When I described Mac interfaces as keyboard/mouse you didn't say "oh, and also graphics, tablets, trackballs and VR headsets". They're an edge case.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Yes... but it's still a very touch-focused system. The mouse support on iPad, you'll notice, has very little precision in where you click. It's a round dot like a finger - you can't precisely click a few pixels. They found a way to make a touchpad while keeping the touch focus.
stevenhuang 5y ago
Is it really amazing? Everyone has been saying the same from the start about wanting separate mobile and desktop UIs.
- simonh 5y ago
  Microsoft's tablet strategy was literally to implement a touch first tablet UI in their desktop OS. Meanwhile loads of companies have been trying to merge desktop UI modes into phones since well before the iPhone. Check out Android desktop mode for a recent example. I remember loads of friends of mine for years telling me 'proper' desktop OSes in tablets would kill the iPad.

aj3 5y ago

You can hack macOS using macOS, but kids won’t be able to get that level of understanding how OS works on iPadOS. This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity. My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).

mark_l_watson 5y ago
Full app development and selling apps in the App Store is close to being released on the iPad. You can use SwiftUI right now in Playgrounds, but Apple has not released app generating functionality yet. It is a funny feeling working on the same Playground project on both an iPad and MacBook, but it works. The code for reading data files is a bit different, but the iPad dev experience will get better.
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  Playground isn’t close to full app development; it’s very powerful tool, but I don’t see many professionals jumping to build on that. Full app development is when Xcode and instruments are available.
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    Well, let's wait and see. Apple wants it to be easy for semi-technical people to write apps.
mhuffman 5y ago
>This is bad for IT. Maybe for how we do IT. But consider the future where 99% of apps are developed on a tablet or phone (for a tablet or phone) using a cloud web interface with mostly low-code or no-code widget drag and drops.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  There's a natural limit to what may be achieved with a low/no code tool. Kids might be able to drag a few elements on screen to create charts and games, but that sort of work doesn't really advance the field.

Fiahil 5y ago

The article does a good job summarizing what works on an iPad and what doesn't ! To that, I will add that iPads are designed as a "single user" device. Sharing one between family members means you have to let them use your Google, Spotify, iCloud accounts. Now that their hardware is all lined up between laptops and mobile devices, I fully expect the merge to happen in a few years. I feel Apple's software has been stagnant for too long and I won't be buying new hardware until then.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
> I feel Apple's software has been stagnant for too long and I won't be buying new hardware until then. Odd. I'm still happy to use Mac OS High Sierra ... Yosemite even. I wonder with each OS release why I would even want the upgrade. Mainly because apps I use (Affinity, etc.) stop working (or stop trying to work) for older versions of Mac OS.
criddell 5y ago
> I will add that iPads are designed as a "single user" device. There are tools available to schools that allow multiple logins on a single iPad. It would be nice if they had something similar for families.

emsy 5y ago

In the article, 2 of 3 examples are about consumption. This just reinforces my opinion that the iPad is primarily a consumption device. My wife is a teacher and I asked her if her students, the so called „digital natives“ hold up to their reputation. She declined and said they were producing TikTok videos and instagram photos at best (which can lead to a creative career but I’d argue that’s the exception not the rule). Even if we improve productivity somewhat, it’s offset by a huge increase in consumption. I don’t see this changing in the near future, mainly because there are no incentives to do otherwise.

fallenhitokiri 5y ago
Author here - first of all: I agree. I should have gone a bit more into detail how „not sure how she’s related“ is using her devices. She is also doing actual work for school on the iPad (research and writing papers).

cwizou 5y ago

Interesting take, there's 0 doubt that iPads are incredibly more intuitive to use, and anecdotally, I've also seen the same observations regarding young and elderly. I think a good portion of that is the indirect pointing method (mouse or trackpad) that takes some use to, but there are certainly inherited conventions, features based on past limitations and other things that look just weird to a new audience picking it up. It's certainly not impossible but one could argue that some oddities could be cleaned up. Releasing software as dmg on Mac is really terrible for new users (and I hate that I did it for Aerial's companion app), it's inherited from the olden days of CD-ROMs and the fact that you have to unmount it is really something that could be improved on. Now, one could argue Apple has very low incentive to provide something better and push for a new norm (most software nowadays does zip and detect if user launches from the Downloads folder, complaining/moving the file in Applications for you), but that's definitely a relic of the past that, while you can still support it for legacy reasons, should be phased out for something better officially pushed by Apple (that is not just the App Store). The Apple approach to feature changes/simplifications on macOS though seems solely based on design. Hiding the document proxy icons on windows in Big Sur is a good example of this [1]. If you've seen Monterey betas, Safari tabs are also losing functionalities (favicons worked a bit like document proxy icons, that's gone now) and while they rolled back some of the most egregious changes (they had made a utter mess with toolbar buttons in beta 1), the new UI is still clunky in terms of general usability and readability. I guess it looks epurated and consistent with the new Safari iPad UI, but do those change help in any way the new users to get around the inherited "peculiarities" of the Mac ? I don't think so. And when Apple does "line up" features to make them consistent accross platforms, it's always the Mac that loses. The phasing out of plugins in Safari for app extensions killed uBlock Origin for example, and the alternatives are certainly not as great. [1] : https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_macos_11_and_12 https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_maco...

joshtynjala 5y ago
Have you tried creating a .pkg file instead of .dmg? Much better user experience, in my opinion. The developer controls where the .app goes, and there’s nothing for the user to unmount when finished.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Talk to a CS professor and they will tell you an OS is what is deep inside the machine but not see. Read a review in arstechnica and you would think an OS is about appearances and the exact shape of each UI component, etc. My understanding is that the kernel is basically the same already, it is the services stacked on top that are different.

srvmshr 5y ago
iOS always ran a stripped down XNU/Darwin based on the original CMU Mach blueprint. Right from the first version. For a fact, Steve Jobs mentioned that in his iPhone introduction keynote in 2007
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It's completely practical to ship the (almost) same kernel with different a different userspace. That's the difference between desktop Linux and Android, XBOX and Windows, etc. In fact if you care about performance and reliability (particularly add more cores and get more performance) there is no option rather than build on a mature kernel. Google's Fuchsia, for instance, is a high risk project which might never reach parity with Android. (I think of Microsoft's "dual track" OS strategy that took 5 years to merge Windows 95 and Windows NT)
  - neilalexander 5y ago
    > Google's Fuchsia, for instance, is a high risk project which might never reach parity with Android. If you write an app using the Android APIs and not native code then it wouldn’t matter if you were really running a Linux-based Android or a Fuchsia-based Android, as long as the API contracts were met. Google knows this — it’s not impossible to imagine that one day Android might not be Linux-based.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      It's possible, but Google has to get all the details right to make it "good enough" if not better. For instance they have to get the story right w.r.t. to drivers and the needs of handset vendors, carriers, etc. Performance has to be good. Microkernel and capability-based systems are notorious for having bottlenecks. Personally I liked the original WSL from Microsoft a lot but Microsoft didn't feel it was good enough because filesystem metadata operations are much slower in Windows NT than they are in Linux. If you do something that involves an excessive number of files (say build the Linux kernel) some people find the performance of WSL unacceptable. Yet, nobody complained about the slowness of filesystem metadata operations before on Windows -- people figured that was just the way it was, might not even have known some operating system was faster, and they stuffed data in SQLLite and otherwise reduced the number of files that they handled. Microsoft felt they had to do something about it and came out with WSL2 which is inferior to WSL and to just running a normal Linux kernel under Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMWare and the like -- because it is still closely coupled to Windows in ways that make "it just works" elusive. (e.g. just requiring that you install it from the Windows Store means you can't install it if your Windows Store is b0rked, which mine often is) So Fuschia might be the future, but getting there involves confronting a lot of details that they might not want to confront. If there are ten critical "non-functional requirements" and they only get nine of them they are doomed.

grey-area 5y ago

IOS will replace Mac OS, the writing has been on the wall for a while now, iOS is where the money comes in and where most usage is, and maintaining dual development apis is painful and costly. Apple doesn’t need to rush this process, but it is inevitable IMO, and is foreshadowed by actions like allowing iOS apps to run on macOS, moving Mac OS closer in UI to mobile, adding essentials like file handling to the mobile os. At this point the underlying OS is the same, the UIs are converging, the UI frameworks for iOS are almost capable of replacing Mac OS, and it would be relatively easy to merge them in the next few years, keeping some extra layers of UI for macs but merging most of it and certainly the dev frameworks. We may see touchscreen macs or dockable iOS devices first though.

np_tedious 5y ago
Hmm. Seems likely in a way, but I don't see how to square this with the professional crowd like software devs
- rewgs 5y ago
  The appearance of a trend does not guarantee the continuation of that trend to its logical extreme. I'd argue that they're just doing the obvious: refining and maturing iPadOS, and unifying the vibe of all their products. This makes sense. Just as one band influencing another doesn't mean that the two bands will eventually converge into an amorphous blob, two products by the same company influencing one another doesn't mean that the two will become a single product. I'd just take Apple's word for it that they've maintained all along: they're letting the device do its thing as best it can. If iOS were swallowing everything, then why did iPadOS split out into its own thing? People don't give enough credence to the fact that these platforms are splitting just as much as they're merging. Also, even if all devices were going the way of "dumbed-down iOS," someone still needs to develop for it, and you best believe that Apple won't loosen their grip on that segment. Just as Mac Pros are loss leaders just to keep the creative class, macOS devices in general will stick around, hell or high water, just to retain the developer class. I for one welcome the iPadOS-ification of macOS, the macOS-ification of iPadOS, and so on. They're just allowing the products to slowly evolve and (ideally) be the best version of what their interface dictates, just as they've always done and always said they're doing.

api 5y ago

I need a real computer. I don’t mind a few UI ideas being borrowed where they make sense but if I can’t run anything I want on it and can’t multitask or combine things together it is not a real computer. iOS works fine for a phone. It’s worthless for my job or my personal interests.

criddell 5y ago
That's kind of the beauty of an iPad. It isn't for everyone. It hasn't been designed as a lowest-common-denominator type of device. There are a few things it's great at and those aren't necessarily the types of things a lot of people want. I have a 2018 iPad and it's easily my favorite computer to use. With a keyboard, it's lovely to write on. With the Pencil and Good Notes it's a fantastic note taking device. Get ProCreate and it's an amazing combination for sketching and drawing. By itself, it's a great device for reference manuals and videos when I'm doing something like fixing my washing machine. I don't read much on it because I have a dedicated e-reader. I don't play games on it because I have a console that's better for gaming. I don't write software on it because I have a workstation and laptop configured exactly for that purpose. I think as they make changes to broaden the iPad's appeal, they may be undermining it.
- api 5y ago
  I agree, and the same applies to the Mac and anything that narrows it. They are for different audiences.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  iPad is the same iOS like iPhone, just with bigger screen. It's not a real device for work. There's no bash in iPad. There's no docker in iPad. There's no accessible filesystem in iPad. You can't connect arduino and program it with iPad. You can't install Java IDE and use it. It's infinitely far away from being usable. And making it usable means turning it into macOS. The only possible way for iPad to become slightly useful is to provide a proper macOS in a some way. But it's still useless because of terrible thermals and will throttle on any serious load. Even laptops are barely able to keep up with ever increasing demands from developers. Tablet is just not made for work. It's good to read a book, that I'll admit. Even browser is barely usable, there's no developer console to kill that annoying div.

FractalHQ 5y ago

I bought an iPad Pro recently, and I hate the fact that I can’t run any of my favorite macOS apps on it despite the fact that the hardware is more than capable. And no web browsers / browser extensions / PWAs? It feels like a toy. Very disappointing.

lostgame 5y ago
Return it and get a MacBook for around the same price. I don’t understand the point of iPad Pros being so powerful when they can’t - y’know - run even Apple’s own Pro software. (Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro) They’re mind-numbingly expensive toys, for sure.
- SomeHacker44 5y ago
  The only use I have for an iPad is Foreflight. If it ran on any other operating system I would not use Apple products. I dislike no fingerprint reader on the iPad Pro too. Still, it is nice for consuming books, blogs and video.
  - walterbell 5y ago
    The latest iPad Air has a fingerprint reader on the power button, which is nice. Hopefully this makes its way to other Apple devices.
- dagmx 5y ago
  They make a lot of sense for creatives. ProCreate, various image editing tools, even video editing... I know a lot of talented professionals who've switched over to iPad Pros for most of their work except 3D. A large part of that is the Apple Pencil and very low latency, but they appreciate every spec bump because it does help their type of work out.
  - lostgame 5y ago
    >> they make a lot of sense for creatives I am a professional creative and use Apple’s software for that professional creativity, in the form of Logic Pro mainly as well as Final Cut. The iPad’s offerings of GarageBand and iMovie are about as useful for me with the work I do as ProCreate vs. MS Paint. No - the iPad isn’t good for ‘creatives’, it’s good for people who do digital visual art or design. That’s...for creatives? On a pro level? Honestly it. It is super shameful that Apple’s own Pro software won’t run on a device they are calling ‘Pro’.

tandav 5y ago

is macOS scans users data like iOS? (and reports to gov)

lostgame 5y ago
No it does not.
- 130e13a 5y ago
  for now, that is
setpatchaddress 5y ago
iOS does not do this.
tehabe 5y ago
macOS 12 will also scan uploads to iCloud and I'm pretty sure iMessage for minors will also have the backdoor active. So, macOS is as vulnerable as iOS.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

They can’t get rid of a general purpose OS. They have to have products that allow you to write software for the iDevices, and web applications, in general. You need macOS for these things.

whatever1 5y ago
Not really. They can set up cloud boxes for that (with pre-installed libraries and simulators) and let Microsoft, HP, Dell etc serve their beloved developers with crappy low-margin hardware. All the development goes to the cloud nowadays. The local machine will soon become irrelevant.
danielrhodes 5y ago
Virtualization. I have never needed to access the shell on my iPhone. But to do dev work I obviously need it on my Mac. But if you look at the rise of Docker and other such things, running stuff on the core OS is not always very optimal. It would be just as good to have a virtualized machine in whatever OS I want and be able to take that around with me. When I can have that, I don’t really care how locked down they make the OS as long as I can stay productive.

sangd 5y ago

iOS is undeniably the one that would lead and determine how the future would be. In terms of money, iOS makes almost 5x more money than MacOS excluding all the services and wearables the iOS brings in as well. It makes lots of sense to continue invest heavily on iPadOS to attract more advanced users like devs. iPad Pro M1 is the baby first step to start bringing in more MacOS compatible pieces to iPadOS. Eventually it would suck some or even most of the MacOS users into the iPadOS.

derefr 5y ago

Y’know Samsung’s DEX, where you plug a Samsung Android device into an HDMI output and the output is not a mirror of the phone’s mobile UI, but rather a full Android desktop UI? There’s little reason that Apple couldn’t do the same thing with iPads, where the “desktop UI” is macOS. Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around for you to plug your device into a monitor. Apple are already training us for this with the new version of Continuity — there’s little difference between “control your Mac from your iPad” and “control the macOS DE container running on your iPad, from your iPad.” The only real differences in interaction paradigm between Continuity and a DEX-like approach, now that I think of it, would be: - a shared filesystem - [possibly] moving iPad/Catalyst apps freely between screens, where they swap between being fullscreen on iPadOS and being windows on macOS This would also be a (rather-charitable) explanation for why iPadOS has never done anything smart so far when plugged into an HDMI display. If they were planning to do this, they wouldn’t bother with half-steps like giving iPadOS apps multi-display support.

walterbell 5y ago
Many people were expectantly waiting for this to be announced at WWDC 2021, especially with the M1-based iPad including silicon support for hypervisor/virtualization and the 16GB RAM / 1TB storage model. Yet nothing was announced, suggesting that the only use of 16GB RAM will be upcoming memory-consuming Adobe "Pro" apps.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  IMO this is the first future-proof mobile device from Apple. Apple has bad habit to install absolutely minimum amounts of RAM into their mobile devices. iPhone had 2 GB RAM when Androids (with similar price) had 8 GB RAM. It means that RAM will be main issue for supporting those devices in the future iOS versions and eventually they'll be dropped, despite extremely powerful CPU and huge storage. But with 16 GB it won't be the case ever. And, of course, CPU will not significantly progress in the future and certainly will not the limiting factor. So this tablet should easily last for another 10 years (if battery could be replaced with reasonable efforts).

tacker2000 5y ago

Maybe the future will be 90% of normal users using dumbed down touch devices, and the rest of us “power” users who need to develop stuff will be using a normal OS. Maybe the normal OSes that we all grew up with are actually overkill for these other users and they dont even want it. Why would they need a shell? Or the ability to install some arbitrary programs? They only need email and word and thats it. Maybe this is not a bad thing in the end? Who knows.

lisper 5y ago
It depends on whether you think computers should be tools for empowering people or subjugating them.
- tacker2000 5y ago
  But isnt that too far fetched? Most people dont care about anything else than checking emails and playing candy crush. They dont think about empowerment or subjugation or changing the world.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    Even if it is not done daily, not being able to tinker with your system is fundamental. You don't have to be an expert yourself, but most computer users know someone with in-depth knowledge or just follow step-by-step instructions from the web or, imagine the concept, a computer book :) This allows a lot of control of your computing environment, you just don't get on an iPad.
  - lisper 5y ago
    Beware of self-fulfilling prophecies, especially this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
zozbot234 5y ago
It's sad that we can only think of touch screen interfaces as "dumbed down". The affordances of a touch-centric interface have yet to be fully explored; at least in principle, there's no reason why they could not be made just as capable as a keyboard+mouse.

gosukiwi 5y ago

Funny the author suggests defaulting to showing all apps as if it was mobile. Windows 8 tried that, didn't work out too well. I do think it would be great to unify though, maybe find a way to keep everyone happy. It would be great to just have an iPad (or any tablet device) and be able to just use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and be able to run any IDE, game, or app you want. As computers get more powerful, it might not even be necessary to have a full-blown desktop PC for regular personal use.

tehabe 5y ago

Depends on what you mean with unify? Apple locked up macOS more and more over the years and I guess or fear, it is just a question of time until you can no longer install apps outside the App Store. After that the difference between macOS and iOS is just the UI.

villgax 5y ago

appleOS

_ph_ 5y ago

There is a lot of reason for having different UIs to start with, between a tablet and a laptop or even a desktop computer. Though I think productivity could be better on the iPad in this regard too. But the very basic problem is file handling. It somehow seems to vary across apps. Some have local storage to themselves which is hidden from everyone, some have visible local storage, others support files/iCloud. While files can be cumbersome on its own, if at least all apps would share the data in a way accessible by files, it would be a start. Best example which keeps bugging me: music. I ripped my CDs into my iTunes library and consequently into Apple Music. Now, Apple Music decided to delete some of my tracks from its library. How to get them back? I even was able to put them into my iCloud drive, but there is no way to add music to your iPad this way. Is there any other way you can add tracks to Apple Music? Is there any way to cause iTunes, which still has all of them, to upload them to Apple Music again (never mention that I do need my Mac for that, destroying the notion of the iPad being stand-alone). Same situation with videos. How to copy videos from iCloud onto the iPad apps? And of course, none of these apps open something like an "open file" mechanism. I quite like my iPad Pro. But I never figured out, how to really "do" things with it. The only positive exception seems to be the "Working Copy" git client, which enables some apps to be used productively.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago
True, these things seems intentionally made complicated since they want to push Apple Music/TV subscriptions. If you still haven't figured it out, you can put iTunes music to your iPad. But it requires like ~$20/year subscription called iTunes Match. So yeah, you can't do it for free using their suggested methods.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Well that is the point, I have the Apple Music subscription which includes iTunes Match. So that is, how my music all got into Apple Music in the first place. But later on, it deleted some tracks I cannot add back. At least for years now, I am looking for a way how to do it. The problems only started, after I subscribed to Apple Music.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

As long as I can still sideload the same applications on macOS - I'm OK with this. Even if it's only enabled on the macOS "side", having a unified OS on unified hardware would be huge step forward in my opinion. Having XCode on an iPad would be convenient as well - though it's not the only IDE I use and would still ultimately prefer a proper laptop/desktop form-factor for "serious" programming.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

I've written about this before, in "The Mac and the iPad aren't meeting in the middle yet": https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html While I won't repeat myself too much, my basic point is that Apple sees iOS (and iPadOS) devices as application consoles and Macs as general purpose computers, and there is no good business case for changing that any time soon. The Venn diagram of "users likely to walk over such a drastic change to the Mac" and "users likely to spend boggling amounts of money on Apple hardware" is close to a perfect circle, and the accounting department would probably not be super keen on taking the bet that the increased service revenue from shoving all app sales through the App Store would make up for the last hardware sales. You need 15–30% of a hell of a lot of apps to make up for a single lost 16-inch MacBook Pro sale, let alone a Mac Pro. Furthermore: given all the radical changes Apple made to the Mac in 2020, that still feels like the "now or never" moment. I wrote back in April that "if M1 Macs and macOS Big Sur didn't lock us into an App Store-only world, it's pretty unlikely macOS Pismo Beach or whatever is going to." Well, it's a year later, and macOS Monterey still isn't. Maybe in a year or two macOS Fresno will come along and prove me wrong, but I'm pretty confident it won't. The flip side of this is that I don't think iPadOS is going to be opened up. I also wrote that I didn't think we would be able to run macOS apps on M1 iPad Pros the way we can run iOS apps on M1 Macs; that's holding true so far, too. I'll note here, though, that the Hacker News crowd has specific ideas about What Makes a Real Computer that I don't think are widely shared by the non-engineer crowd, and that honestly a lot of you don't have a clear idea of how much automation and app interoperability is possible within iOS's restrictions. I prefer using the Mac, in no small part because I've been using Unix for close to three decades, but it's startling how much I'm able to do on the iPad even with its current nerfball limitations. And, sure, the obvious objection is that "application console" is arbitrary, and it is. But isn't "game console" just as arbitrary? I mean, a PlayStation 5 has an 8-core CPU with 16GB of RAM; you can't develop software on it because Sony won't let you, full stop. We're more annoyed about that limitation being on the iPad because the arbitrariness feels more obvious, because we didn't buy the iPad "only" for gaming. But on a technical level, there's not a whole lot of difference. The linked article makes the prediction that Apple is going to be trying to drive more and more people to the iPad and away from the Mac. I don't buy that, simply because the evidence just doesn't support it. They have literally just reported the strongest quarter of Mac sales in the company's history. It's not just that they're moving to their own CPU architecture, it's that they're in the process of rolling out new industrial designs for the entire Mac lineup. This is not what you do if your business goal is to have Mac sales taper off! My feeling now remains the same as it did, er, all the way back in April: iPadOS and macOS are never going to merge. In the long run, there is going to be an operating system that replaces both of them, and the groundwork for that new OS is being laid out now. But it's not going to be here any time soon, and nobody (including me) should be making confident predictions about what that new OS will be -- what it will and won't do, what it will and won't allow, how locked down or open it will be.

canuckintime 5y ago

Another paradigm not often discussed is to keep iPadOS and macOS distinct but offer macOS as an app (hardware virtualized vm) on iPadOS. This is a similar transition to MS-DOS on Windows 95 (successful), Unix terminal on Mac OS X (successful) or Windows 8 desktop program in Windows 8 tablet Metro shell (unsuccessful). Most people just need MacOSX for 10% of their computing needs — that 10% is unique for most people though — and an iPad Pro able to access macOS when needed would be enough for peace of mind. On the flip side if Apple just added cellular and Apple Pencil support to the Mac (not even a touchscreen/pen supported screen; just Apple Pencil support for the trackpad) it would decimate sales of iPad Pro.

memetomancer 5y ago

I for one ain't bothered: It's clear to me that Apple needs tools to engineer these spectacular devices and there would be little or no sense to them designing away the power of MacOS and landing on a product range limited to simple consumption. Does anyone foresee a time where Apple migrates to something like Lenovo Laptops or Windows or some scraggly Linux desktop environment? Apple won't be losing these tools any time soon. At worst we might see dual mode macbooks that can be switched between MacOS and iOS paradigms. Above and beyond that fairly self-evident conclusion, there is plenty of room for more sophisticated interaction with iOS devices that maintain the basic interface but also provide extremely sophisticated data manipulation capabilities. Perhaps even more powerfully than our beloved UNIX shells - think something like AI assisted voice interaction where you can easily state a pipeline verbally: "take results from A that contain N and modify them by X and then sort them by I and make a graph and paste it to my document". (e.g., grep | sed | sort | gnuplot | paste >> example.doc) That sort of thing is potentially just a few iterations away and simultaneously more powerful and more useful than text mode pipes, if only for the fact that the user wouldn't be required to memorize thousands of cryptic flags/switches. The same interface could be used to string these directives together to form scripts and set jobs, etc. This isn't meant to be a specific prediction, by the way, just one glimpse into the idea space. There are so many good ideas that people haven't had yet... it just staggers the mind to consider the potential. I'm just skimming the surface but surely there are so many ways to marry the insanely intuitive discoverability of something like iOS with the equally awesome power of the UNIX philosophy. But it's up to us to find them, rather than get inflexible and grumbly and say it can't be done, or Apple is stupid, or whatever nonsense take you might jerk your knee towards ;)

pininja 5y ago
I’ve pretty excited for the day I can do my programming job on an iPad in addition to my laptop. Apple has captured the software engineering market very well. Even the Microsoft F# shop I worked at had Apple hardware on most desks running Parallels or Boot Camp, and the two jobs I’ve had since were standard-issue MacBook Pro. The pipeline you described reminds me of Apple Shortcuts - it’s easy and useful. Most recently I made a GIF out of a bunch of photos on my phone, which is a simple task that used to require a far from ideal app (ads, black-box that could be hiding analytics and tracking tasks).

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

If the latest iPhone chip is as powerful as the Intel chip used in MacBooks, why shouldn't I be able to connect a hdmi to usb c cable to my phone and get a full MacOS machine on the external display? (Like Samsung dex does this or so did Ubuntu phone from 2014-15?) Same question with Android phones and Chrome OS. What's the technical challenge? I feel the only reason Apple won't do it is because then instead of buying 2 to 3 devices, people would buy just one, which will hurt their revenue. (Doesn't explain why Google won't)

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now. The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be shifted to be the ones living in the emulation layer like Classic OS9 apps to eventually be removed completely. If you think I’m wrong, forget your own opinions and prejudices to iPad and walled garden computing and imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.

warning26 5y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing, but my key question here is: how will Apple handle lower-level development cases? It's not difficult to imagine a watered-down iPad XCode shipping, but what about the tooling they use to build iOS itself? After all, Apple has to use something to develop iOS, and I think it's unlikely they'd create a special in-house operating system for the exclusive use of their OS development teams that's totally different than what they ship to consumers.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Why are you assuming iPadOS wouldn’t support low-level development?
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  I'm sure that they could just use Linux for that. I wouldn't be surprised if they're using Linux right now.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Almost all Apple engineers use Macs.
CDSlice 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago

This was dumb when Windows 8 did it, and it remains dumb. Unifying an OS and it's GUI/UX layer across devices with fundamental differences like this gives you lowest denominator crap.

eddieh 5y ago

I see a bunch of posts about the iPad being a "consume" only device and that's totally totally wrong. I've had an iPad since day one, generation one and took notes with an aftermarket stylus. I used Keynote and OmniGraffle to make slideshows and diagrams. I even bought an Apogee JAM and was able to record my electric guitar in GarageBand and used several other apps for guitar effects and simulated amplification. My favorite was AmpKit+ [http://agilepartners.com/apps/ampkit/ http://agilepartners.com/apps/ampkit/]. The iPad is a great creator's device and has only improved with the Apple Pencil and other enhancements. That being said, if Apple keeps moving macOS towards iPadOS I'm out. The iPad is a complementary device as I use it. It can not replace a notebook computer and my notebook computer can not replace my desktop. There are definitely people that can get by with just an iPad or even just a smartphone, but I can't and will not. There are still many options for non-Apple notebooks and workstations and many more OS options too.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
To me the real question is if a machine running MacOS existed in a Surface-like form factor that had touchscreen and pen support would it be better than the iPad at the tasks you just described. I'm finding it harder and harder to justify that the divergence even needed to happen at all when more and more iPad users are just interacting with it via keyboard case and trackpad.
swiley 5y ago
You're always consuming someone else's software on it though. Being able to rip out and re-implement even parts of your OS gives you a radically different view of computers than the one you get from an OS that doesn't even let you write your own alarm clock.