Developers Expect iOS and MacOS To Merge

AHuxley noticed the frightening little Ars story talking about a certain expectation that iOS and MacOS will merge, leading to a single DRM-locked OS on your MacBook and your iPad. Certainly Apple would love a piece of every app sold. Now I'm sure that this has been discussed over there, but I wouldn't expect it any time soon.

At Ease

[tepples]

If I were Apple I'd make a desktop iOS a user option like the current Parental Controls.

Apple tried this before; it was called At Ease [wikipedia.org].

Nothing to see here..

[Rytr23]

Simply garbage, which is not surprising considering the source. That is all.

Re:At Ease

[Ephemeriis]

If I were Apple I'd make a desktop iOS a user option like the current Parental Controls.

Apple tried this before; it was called At Ease [wikipedia.org].

And it genuinely kicked ass at the time.

I had a Macintosh Performa 6300 that was being used as a shared family computer back then. At Ease allowed me to set up a relatively safe and secure way to share that computer with our kids, without giving them access to absolutely everything.

Steve commented on this

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.macstories.net/news/steve-jobs-no-mac-app-store/ [macstories.net]

Re:More like an option

[dniq]

There is already a Simple Finder option in the current OSX, which only provides the very basic functionality to the user. My mom is using - and loving - it. No chance to break stuff, and incredibly easy for her to use.

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[ahankinson]

You mean like the Mach kernel that both the iOS and OS X share? Or the BSD-based Darwin subsystem? Or some of the Cocoa frameworks?

Re:Not going to happend, uses same OS's already

[am 2k]

If you'd read the article, you'd know that they were talking about merging UIKit into AppKit, not the OS as a whole (bad summary there, though).

A lot of stuff in UIKit is done the way it'd be done in AppKit were it created today. For example, in UIKit every view is automatically OpenGL-backed (via Core Animation). In AppKit, you have to enable that on a per-view basis, because it can cause problems (for example, WebViews always stay blank that way). Further, the Obj-C 32bit runtime on Mac OS X is the old one from the NeXTSTEP days. In 64bit and on iOS (which is 32bit), they're using a completely rewritten and not backwards-compatible one that allows many nice things like automatically generated instance variables, better exception handling and a few more things since iOS4 that are covered under their NDA (they're explained in the WWDC videos).

Re:Apps will disappear

[nyctopterus]

Nearly all the apps on my iPod touch are games. And no, you cannot currently do what they do this with HTML5 and Javascript (or, at least, they would be very slow to write and have terrible performance).

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[0100010001010011]

Virginia Tech's [apple.com] System X [vt.edu]

I mean it's not like they broke into the top 10 or anything:
Ranking seventh in the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful computer systems, System X was built at a fifth of the cost of the second-least expensive system in the top 10.

Not only that, but every computer that ships with OS X has the ability to become part of an XGrid. All you have to do is enable a checkbox in the Sharing control panel and that's it. XCode will seek out other XGrid computers and use it to compile.

Re:Misleading summary

[Dog-Cow]

The (current) iPad does not have a GPS receiver.

Re:Not like I havent been saying this for a while

[e4g4]

I'd recommend watching the interview with Jobs at D8 (by Mossberg and some other WSJ journalist), it's available (free) on iTunes. He made an excellent car analogy, equating the PC (as in personal computer, not PC/Mac) to trucks in the early days of the automobile market. Basically - the analogy was that back when automobiles were new, the vast majority of cars were trucks, designed for getting work done. As that technology trickled down into the popular market, the car became more user friendly (automatic transmissions, air conditioning, radio, etc.) and less like trucks. Jobs essentially equated MacOS and iOS with trucks and sedans. Ultimately, his point was that there are still trucks now (implying that Apple has no intention of killing their entry in the PC market). As I see it - Apple would love for MacOS marketshare to stay exactly where it is for the foreseeable future (5%) and replace the other 93ish% with iOS. Jobs is not a fool - he knows that we need trucks; I do not believe that Apple has any intention of killing MacOS.

Re:Not like I havent been saying this for a while

[jacksonj04]

You mean the new Mac Minis they released last week?

Re:It's somewhat expected.

[0100010001010011]

Did you not even read System X's history on their website?

1) Computer technology improves. I don't think any computer that was in the top 10 in 2006 was in the top 10 in 2010.
2) When it was "last ranked", in 2006 it was #47. When it was built, in 2003, it was ranked #3. When it was rebuilt in 2004 with the current G5s, it was ranked #7 (which is what the Apple article is about).

I never understood this point of view.

[falconwolf]

Why wouldn't you want the system wide open and available for your kids to tinker with?

Because I, in the third person, only have one computer and I don't want it hosed. I, the real me, use my Mac for different things and have set up more than one user account so that working in one I will not hose the whole system. Among the things I use it for is development, financial planning, photography, and programming. Only one account has administrator privileges, and I only log into that one to install software, to run updates, or for maintenance.

Falcon

Re:Not like I havent been saying this for a while

[jo_ham]

Too long didn't read, after your first paragraph pretty much defined what it was you were going to say.

Touched a nerve did he? Too close to the truth?