Could Apple Kill Off Mac OS X? 577
Barence writes "When Steve Jobs announced last night that he was 'going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,' it was the clearest indication yet that Apple is phasing out Mac OS X, argues PC Pro's Barry Collins. 'Over the past couple of months, there have been continual rumours that Apple is testing the iPad's A5 processor in its MacBook range, suggesting Apple believes iOS could stretch further than smartphones and tablets,' Collins argues. Plus, Apple would take a 30% cut on all Mac software if it mandated downloads via the App Store only. 'The only part of Apple's portfolio where iOS doesn't make sense is in the high-end. Yet, Apple's already discontinued its Xserve range of servers and... it's almost exclusively fixated on the consumer market,' he argues."
Re:Where's the DOJ (Score:5, Informative)
You need to read up on the legal definition of a monopoly. What MS was dinged for was using its monopoly in OS and Office software to drive out competition in the web browser software market. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in mobile OS software (iOS is actually losing ground to android); Apple doesn't have a monopoly in desktop/laptop OS software (Windows still accounts for 90+%); Apple doesn't have a monopoly in anything (no, "monopoly in software that runs on macs" is not a legal monopoly, otherwise every single company would have a "monopoly" in some arbitrarily defined, meaningless, sliver "market").
A monopoly is the market power to price your offerings without regard to the price of competitors offerings. Apple doesn't have one, so they can't be accused of leveraging a monopoly they don't have.
Re:...and this is why we RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty sure that they're not going to kill off a segment that generates about $5Billion/quarter.
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q211data_sum.pdf [apple.com]
Re:Stupid! (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth remembering that iOS and Mac OS X are just brands. The software stacks are almost identical. iOS has UIKit and AVKit and a few other frameworks, OS X has AppKit and a few legacy frameworks, but aside from that they're basically the same. The kernel is the same. The GUI is the Quartz window server in both cases (just with different window management policies). The core frameworks (libSystem, CoreFoundation, Foundation, CoreGraphics, and so on) are the same on both.
With this in mind, it's not totally unreasonable to consider that they may phase one or the other out at some point in the future. It would be trivial to do, just install whichever missing frameworks people care about on the one that they decide to keep.
The minimal effort involved, however, rather argues against Apple doing it. The most important reason why iOS uses UIKit instead of AppKit is to force developers to redesign their user interfaces for small devices with touchscreens, rather than just ship bad ports of apps designed for keyboard and mouse. If you write an application for iOS or OS X, you can port it to the other reusing all of your model and controller classes, and 90% of any code in custom view classes. Merging the two platforms would mean that developers could easily ship one application for both systems without any modifications, which Apple doesn't want. Given the code sharing between iOS and OS X, there's no real incentive for Apple to kill either - it wouldn't save them very much development cost, because most of the development is already shared.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
OS X has been the top selling Unix-based workstation OS for half a decade now.
They already moved into the market IRIX and SunOS left behind a long time ago.