by Jean-Louis Gassée
Operating systems don’t age well. Some have better genes than others or they have more competent caretakers, but sooner or later they are stricken by a cancer of bug fixes upon bug fixes, upgrades upon upgrades. I know, I lived inside two OS sausage factories, Apple and Be, and was closely associated with a third, PalmSource. I can recall the smell.
The main cause of OS cancer is backwards compatibility, the need to stay compatible with existing application software. OS designers are caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Customers want the benefit of the future, new features, hardware and software, but without having to jettison their investment in the past, in their applications.
OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning—and in the market—the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.
Enter the iPhone.
The iPhone OS, iOS, is a Macintosh OS X derivative…but without having to support Macintosh applications. Pared down to run on a smaller hardware platform, cleaned up to be more secure and tuned for a Touch UI, iOS is the dream without the ugly past. Tens of millions of iPhones, hundreds of thousands of applications, and billions of downloads later, this is a new morning without the hangover.
And now we have the iPad, another iOS device. (I’ll omit the newer Apple TV for the time being.) 8.5 million iPads were shipped by September, a mere six months after its introduction. The installed base will reach 14 to 15 million units by the end of this year.
To paraphrase the always modest Apple PR boilerplate phrase (“Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s …”) the iPad re-ignited the marginal tablet category.
After more than 30 years of stalled attempts, the tablet genre has finally gelled. We see a flurry of tablet announcements from Asus, HP, Samsung, Dell, Archos, and many others, using Windows 7, WebOS, and Android. Surprisingly, we have yet to hear a pundit declare 2011 ‘The Year of The Tablet’. It’ll come.
On the other hand… Apple held a Back to the Mac event at its Cupertino HQ last week. As the name implies, Apple wants to make it clear that it’s still committed to personal computers. (You can see the full keynote here…but that’s 90 minutes. A tongue-in-cheek, adjective-laden 104 second montage gets to the essence here.) The iPhone may generate half of Apple’s revenue, but the event reminded us that Macintosh desktops and laptops are a $20B/yr business—a business that’s growing faster than the rest of the PC industry. Apple made a point of showing how the iPad, after taking its genes from the Mac, was feeding DNA back to its progenitor by way of the Touch UI that will appear in the release dubbed “Lion”, OS X 10.7.
During the Back to the Mac presentation, two prayers of mine were answered: A Macintosh App Store and a smaller laptop. The App Store has received the expected “walled garden” critique, but having seen how difficult it is for small Mac software developers to get retail shelf space or to make money selling their wares on line, I like the idea. A few days ago, I downloaded a neat little utility to silence the startup sound on my new 11” MacBook Air. How much did the developer make? Zero, it’s freeware; the programmer didn’t want to spend the time and money to set up a commercial site. How much would I have paid for it from a Mac App Store? Less than $5, more than 99 cents.
As for the 11” MacBook Air, Walt Mossberg, WSJ’s tech guru, penned an insightful review that’s neatly summed up in its title: “MacBook Air Has the Feel Of an iPad In a Laptop”.
So: A clean, fresh iOS; we’re not abandoning the Mac…What are we to make of these competing messages? My theory:
- Today’s PC operating systems have advanced cancer
- Personal computers as we know them are here to stay
- Apple will move to something like an iOS Macintosh
Easier said than done. Steve Jobs remembers well the trouble Apple had getting apps for the first Macintosh, the painful failures of Lotus Jazz, the lame Mac software from Software Publishing Corp., creator of the best-selling PFS: series for the Apple ][. Ironically, some of the best software came from Microsoft—the word frenemy hadn’t been coined yet but retroactively fits. So, just like the iPhone App Store made the iPhone, the Macintosh needs a marketplace, an agora in preparation for the transition.
But a transition to what?
An evolution of the iPad? Certainly not something I saw at Il Fornaio, one of the local Valley watering holes. There, a very serious woman had her iPad standing on the official Apple keyboard dock, writing and, from time to time, raising her hand and touching something on the screen. As Jobs pointed out in the keynote above, it’s an ergonomic no-no.
Now, turn to the laptop. As one of my colleagues says: “It’s dark inside the box.” It’s what the machine does that matters, not what’s inside. Indeed. Imagine a port of OS X on an ARM, or A4, or AX processor, or even a Loongson CPU for that matter. If the right applications have been ported or adapted or, even better, created de novo for the platform —and made available through the App Store—would we object?
But, you’ll argue, “Aren’t these processors much less powerful than Intel’s?” Ask an iPad user: The machine feels swift and fluid, much more than a conventional PC.
Yes, there are no heavy-duty apps such as Photoshop or AutoCAD for the iPad. (AutoDesk publishes an AutoCAD companion app for the iPad and the iPhone.), but who knows? Adobe might be tempted to do for Photoshop what Apple has done for its OS: Scrap the past and build a modern Photoshop that’s written from the ground up.
Intel processors suffer the same type of cancer that afflicts operating systems. Their instruction sets and, therefore, their hardware, power consumption, and cost are beset by the tortuous need to stay compatible with existing code while offering an endless procession of new features. Intel has tried a fresh approach at least three times: the iPAX 32 in the early 80s, the Itanium (promptly renamed Itanic, a political compromise hammered out to keep HP’s PA architecture out of contention), and a brief fling with ARM called the XScale. Each time, the company (or the market) decided backwards compatibility was the way to go. Intel’s position is transparent: They believe that the might of their technology and manufacturing will bulldoze the cost and power consumption obstacles of the x86 architecture.
(We’ll note in passing that there is no Wintel in smartphones. For its Really Personal Computers, for its Windows Phone 7 devices, Microsoft is all ARM.)
Compare the bulldozer approach to what Apple did when it designed the A4, the “dark inside” of the iPad. Apple’s next Mac processor could be a multicore (or multi-chip) ARM derivative. And the company has proven time and again that it knows how to port software, and its support of the Open Source LLVM and Clang projects give it additional hardware independence. We all know the Apple Way: Integration. From bare metal to the flesh, from the processor to the Apple Store. Hardware, OS, applications, distribution… Apple knows how to control its own destiny.
Tomorrow’s MacBook Air might have even more of the “Feel of an iPad in a Laptop” that Walt Mossberg detected. The tablet and the laptop could run on the same “dark insides”, with the same software, and the same Touch UI interface. And, for a desktop machine, an iMac successor, we already have the Magic Trackpad for touch input.
(IMCO, the current Trackpad doesn’t feel magical enough: on the two devices I own, the touch input isn’t as reliable, pleasant and “second nature” as it is with existing mice or a laptop trackpads. I gave up after two weeks. I’m not the only one with that view, I’ve asked. And the local Apple Store doesn’t push appear eager to push the device either.)
All this doesn’t mean the x86-based Macs would disappear overnight: high-end Mac Pros, for example, might continue for a while as they do today for applications such as Logic Studio or Final Cut.
If this sounds farfetched, one question and an observation.
The question: Would you bet the longer term future of your $20B Mac business on an endless series of painfully debugged x86-based OS X incremental releases? Or would you rather find a way to move that franchise to a fresh hardware/software platform fully under your control?
The observation: Last week, the other Steve, Ballmer, was on stage at the Gartner Symposium. There, he was asked about Microsoft’s “biggest gamble”. Without missing a beat, as this forceful public speaker never does, he answered: “The next revision of Windows.” Not Windows Phone 7, not the Kinect game device, all near and dear to his heart, but Windows 8. (See here and here.)
He, too, is thinking about the future of the PC business.
PS: As I edited this note, I found this TechCrunch post dealing with the same iPad-Mac convergence.
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56 Comments
I’m afraid I scrambled ideas. I wrote ‘Imagine a port of OS X on an ARM…’ What really matters is moving to an evolution of iOS, not staying on OS X for ever. Evolving iOS could mean adding back features such as an explicit document store.
I studied that convergence in this article here http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/10/21/google-chrome-os-precursor-mac-os-x-107/ and saw some parallels between it and Google Chrome OS and Android. One OS to rule them all…
iPhoto ’11 has migrated some iOS concepts to Mac OS X. Unfortunately, it made some actions more difficult compared with the previous version.
Convergence of iPad and the Mac is fine but I hope we don’t lose some of the great things about the mac like multi tasking (multi tasking sucks on the iPad), Spaces, Expose, File Manager etc.
OK that makes perfect sense dude. Well done.
http://www.anonymize.it.tc
@V. Varghese: Great questions.
First: multitasking. Your’re right, ot great on the iPad. Let’s see what happens with the upcoming November iOS update. iOS multitasking is biased towards conserving the battery. The bias, the tuning will/would be different on an “iOS Mac”.
Second: Exposé, Spaces, File Manager and the like. There, we’ll see Dear Leader at work, paring things down. To what level? I have no idea. Looking at the iPad and all the things “it doesn’t have”, I have to think again about cancerous featuritis. I’m married to an artist, a painter and home builder. What matters to her? I’m her Mac chauffeur, she won’t wrestle with all the UI tools, but she’ll learn Google Sketchup so she can deal with architects, kitchen builders and, great frustration, the bolsheviks at Palo Alto’s Building Department.
This said, Apple’s fixation to “irregular” UI constructs such as the “Fan” or the “Grid” is mystifying: we’re forced to learn a new behavior without a commensurate payoff.
@Elbert Lo. Unfortunately, you’re right. There’s something strange going on with Apple apps. Don’t get me started on iTunes…
JLG,
Job’s comments on the earnings call lead me to the same conclusions.
The “integrated” approach we see in iOS devices will makes its way to the Mac. Its really the only way to move the platform forward ….and differentiate itself from Wintel boxes. Next years MBA will show the way.
Balmer & company see this coming …but W8 is already baked & not the answer. More likely, W9.
-Tek
http://twitter.com/TektonikShift
Why is iTunes so crappy?
Its a “heavy” App; takes long to load and not so responsive.
Apple will have to overcome this if its going to be successful expanding its “better because its integrated” theme into the Mac line up.
-Tek
I agree. With one caveat, I dont believe there is a tablet market. I believe there is only an iPad market.
When I tried out an iPad at the Apple store, as a software developer, I was instantly blown away. The first thought that came to my mind was, “what have we been doing wrong all this time?”.
I think that thought speaks for itself.
“Intel processors suffer the same type of cancer that afflicts operating systems”
Given the direction Apple is going, and that fact that the rest of the PC industry will follow …. Intel will become much different company in 2012/2013 than it is today.
My take;
Intel is staffed with plenty effected antibodies ready to kill any non-x86 CPU. They have been too successful in the marketplace to accept any other way.
I don’t hold out much hope for their Infineon purchase.
-Tek
Another reason x86 might not disappear as quickly is that it gives users the option to run Windows when, and for whatever personal reason, necessary – be it via Bootcamp or virtualisation. That’s been a big factor in people’s growing readiness to embrace Mac hardware.
Mr. Gassée,
Thank you very much for your insightful article today about where the OS for the Mac is likely heading (I sent you an email with the same questions I’m posting here, sorry I should have looked first for your blog as I didn’t know at first that CBS was re-posting from your blog).
As a developer, I love the idea of the App Store for the Mac — it has all the feel of a leveling of the playing field opportunity that comes along once in a great while (it has reinvention written all over it)! My only concern — what about people who have specialist needs? For example, scientists or analysts who can, today, install from source, specialized languages and tools such as the R language (its framework, libraries, binaries), or Ruby, Python, even Fortran! Will Apple have such integrated control in the future that they will restrict (for the entire machine not just through their own App Store) such tools and languages (as we see Apple no longer wants to support Java on the Mac)? What about open source and the sharing of code? Clearly open source has proven to be a viable maintenance model where the power of a community collaborates on complex projects. Locking down the entire system and not even allowing developers or specialists to have root access to their machines could have unintended consequences.
Any further thoughts about this? Are my worries about the future misplaced?
Best wishes,
-Eddie
Regarding “One OS to rule them all”, I thing it shall be more open-minded. As mentioned processor is no longer relevant, OS will not be relevant as well. The focus is application, when user want to be done instead of what underlying software or hardware. So at the end I think it will be the programming framework and distribution model that matter.
Isn’t ‘Lion’ a hint? What might come after Lion? Apple’s Next Macintosh OS!
Might Apple base the new Macs on an Apple designed chip implementing ARM’s A 15? In its strategy, Apple has been giving the highest priority to iOS devices, because personal computing has been decentering from the desktop and recentering to ‘anywhere’, but is not leaving Mac OS X devices (Macs) behind. Macs will play a transformed and significant role in the new emergent scenario of integrated computing over optimized platforms (Mac, iPad, iPhone).
I’ll have none of this!
Apple has relatively recently left behind Carbon and very recently Java. Will we see a renewed Cocoa, streamlined and with more that a touch of multi touch? Isn’t that what the Back to the Mac ‘philosophy’ ultimately is all about?
TektonikShift–
Your a typical PC elitist bitching “Why is iTunes so crappy?”
As a new Windows 7 user (a switcher from Mac OS X) I have heard this Unfounded comment sooo many times…. and its just a a freaking lie.
Now its time to put up or STFU…
Name an app on Windows that is as good as or better.. and No Window media player isn’t nor is WinAmp.
Some great info here. I like this blog style!
The *real* next-generation OS won’t be based on existing processors, won’t be designed to run existing mainstream software, and will be easy enough to program that kids will learn to do it in primary school. It will be found in toys and supercomputers and smart products and “the” interface will be contextual to the needs of the user and not tied to a specific paradigm like mouse or other pointing device, or keyboard or any other specific existing or future interface. It has been available for 30 years and is being used to teach kids in 3rd world countries how to program.
Apple promised a modern integrated imaging model with Mac OS X in 2000. Let’s look at what an integrated modern imaging model implies. A modern integrated imaging model has a superset of graphics primitives and commands to manipulate the graphic primitives for the display model, and a subset of the library for the portable digital document model. Mac OS X implemented the Adobe imaging model, but in relation to ColorSync/ICC imaging the implementation of ISO 15930 PDF/X-3 was failed by the Apple ColorSync Users List, and in relation to TrueType/Unicode imaging the situation is that in ISO 19005-1:2005 PDF/A it is still assumed that the Adobe Type 42 Specification applies, that is, the tables that map from characters to glyphs are stripped and the glyph table is subset. The complete mapping from the input of ISO10646/Unicode to the glyph output isn’t captured (http://developer.apple.com/fonts/ttrefman/RM06/Chap6Zapf.html).
In other words, while PDF may be portable from system to system, PDF is not repurposeable. In particular, support for search is scant.
Best wishes,
Henrik Holmegaard
Kyderdog,
Did you try to read his full comment? Or the one above it? He’s complaining about iTunes, not bashing Apple in general. Also, frankly, iTunes really _is_ bloated. Time for a revamp.
…oh no I just fed the troll, didn’t I…
It is highly unlikely that your silencer utility would be approved for the App Store. Don’t expect to see many utility applications at all.
Jean-Louis,
I felt the same as you about the new Trackpad – just a bit too jerky for my taste. After reading your critique I decided to switch back to the mouse. In doing so I realized that I had left the mouse plugged into the keyboard while using the Trackpad (just in case I needed it for something). When I unplugged the mouse, the Trackpad became far smoother and more responsive, and I may stick with it.
Paul
It would be an interesting idea if there was an App Store for software that improved things about the Mac interface, but Apple is explicitly disallowing those. The freeware app to silence the startup sound would almost certainly not be allowed in the Mac App Store. It sounds like it violates about a half dozen of their rules.
It would “change the native user interface elements or behaviors of Mac OS X” (i.e., the boot process). It probably “install(s) code or resources in shared locations”. I would guess that it might be implemented as a “kernel extension”, or at least “uses a private API”. It probably requires “escalation to root privileges”.
The Mac App Store isn’t for the kind of extensions that us Mac users have been installing for the past 20 years, just as the iTunes (iOS) App Store doesn’t have any software that improves the user interface of iOS devices. It’s going to be for the cute little toys like you see on the iPhone App Store today.
The diagram presented at “Back to the Mac” that showed how Mac OS X led to the iPhone which led to the iPad which is going back to Mac OS X was of no surprise to me. Each of Apple’s products informs the others. It’s a natural evolution of their portoflio — software or hardware.
I think the biggest challenge facing Apple now is managing the cloud — making sense of all the data between and among Mac OS X and iOS devices regardless of the iTunes/MobileMe cloud. The current hub-and-not-quite-spoke strategy needs to evolve. iTunes.app is far too monolithic and is an anchor on otherwise effortless iOS devices. Forcing music sync via a hard-wired port for iPods is fine, but I think the premium of iOS should include a smarter, cleaner sync scheme.
Bandwidth limitations could be addressed if one need only sync and iOS device by telling iTunes/MobileMe which versions of which apps are installed on that device. App data itself could be synced and done in an atomic fashion so one doesn’t have to load an entire iOS image just to keep data intact. Plus, many apps are already in other clouds, so much of that heavy lifting isn’t even on Apple’s back.
It’s apparent that the ‘micropayment’ model is what is spawning the i* revolution… be it $.99 songs, or being able to buy apps ‘on the go.’ for less than a bottle of perrier. It’s the Alan Cox model of software (or content) ‘IC’ coming to fruition. No one buys an OS… everyone buys something that offers the functionality I ‘need’(/’want’). Other than the cachet factor of Apple’s HW design, the thing that sells Mac is that it’s easier to use/manage than anything else. Sometimes their UX design is draconian, and definitely it’s not designed for ‘power users,’ but it’s compelling for the young and the old, and the non-’bare metal’ enthusiast.
The fact that Apple (and NeXT before it, have been able to change the HW ‘under the hood’ without dooming the company (has any company, other than say IBM and HP been able to do that, and neither of those were ‘consumer grade’ moves… MVS on ‘big iron’ to zOS on PowerSeries was not one heralded in USA Today) brings me comfort in that to Apple it’s not about being wedded to an architecture long after it’s obsolete, it’s about user experience, and an architecture that allows it to migrate to a more compelling experience as the technology allows.
Not lost on me is the fact that as Apple becomes the ‘people’s choice’ of UX, will they be able to continue to evolve with developing that ‘feature retention’ cancer that the enertial gravity of 100′s of millions of users can cause? Can Apple change the ‘orientation lock’ button to a ‘mute’ button and not have it become the Vista moment of iOS? I trust that as long as Apple considers ‘whats’ best for the everyday consumer’ trumps ‘feature checklist’ (see multi-tasking… how many people really need multi-tasking on a phone? Most people were excited just to have a real web browser on their phone when they weren’t making a call… do they need to get a ‘tweet alert’ while in the middle of drafting an email message?)…
As long as Apple makes the computer more ‘functional’ to get real world stuff done, what makes up the bare metal doesn’t matter. And the OS doesn’t matter… Really just the UX and the (transparent) migration to the new experience matters. If it’s more intuitive than before and ‘just works’ most people (and we’re now talking ‘billions’ not 100s of thousands) will continue to buy Apple HW….
‘Just Works….’ That’s the DNA that scares Microsoft and Intel and Adobe, and Google, and HTC, and Sony, and HP and Dell. Apple controls it from the powerplug (magsafe…. so sweet), to the touch screen, to the app store. No other company can deliver on that promise as quickly and as non-compromisingly as Apple can…
If Only Apple can become the global 4G wireless carrier…. the circle will be complete.
Jean-Louise wrote:
> A few days ago, I downloaded a neat little utility to silence the startup sound on my new 11” MacBook Air.
Such an application will likely never be allowed in the Mac App Store, just as it would never make it into the current App Store for iOS. FWIW, I think that’s important to the discussion about how the App Store can help and/or hurt current indie developers for the Mac. Little utility apps like that, which hack the system to provide some alternative functionality, will not be sold in the Mac App Store, and at some point, the Mac App Store could become the sole means of delivering software for Mac OS X. So in this particular, if niche, example, the opening of one market may be closing another. I think all your other points hold up, but I saw a small irony in that example.
Really dug the analysis overall, thanks for the great article.
What about content generation, especially for iOS or OS X? Authors, bloggers, programmers all need keyboards for the foreseeable future. All those, I suppose, could dictate, but, it’s more efficient to type code. You can only get so far with the GUI builders. I’m still about 5% of my speed on a touch device, and that’s when I’m typing in English, not C++.
Content generation is, understandably, a smaller market than content consumption. But, obviously, a necessary one. I would love to give up my keyboard, but for what?
TektonikShift–
Some of the reasons I have heard why itunes isn’t the greatest.
the have sync, a player/editor, and a store all rolled into one for business purposes mostly.
they have to keep a windows port
not the best of reasons but they are the number 1 music seller and for this i think easy of installation outweighs easy of use.
I really don’t think this is the direction Apple is going. To a degree. But they’re not about to give up the desktop any time soon. They are and will way vastly more powerful than tablets and laptops. And power is exactly what we need for many applications.
And by the way, Autocad was just announced for Mac.
I hate to tell you, but the app that silenced your start up sound will probably now be allowed in the Mac App store as it must violate some terms in order to change your system’s settings. You would still have to go out into the wild to get it. And if the App store becomes the same walled garden as the iPhone you would have to jailbreak your computer – and possibly void your warranty – in order to use that app at all.
Well said, JLG.
I totally agree that the “Magic Trackpad” is lacking some magic. I think it is a temporary fix, designed to hold us over until Touch 2.0 arrives.
1) Touch is better when it is direct (screen) than indirect (trackpad).
2) capacitive+resistive (C+R) touch screens. Fingers are great for some things; stylii are great for other things; and mice/trackpads are great for the rest. Supporting all of these methods is optimal.
3) As Jobs said, “Touch needs to be horizontal”, so MacBooks will all be “convertible” tablets with C+R touch-screens. That is, the screen can rotate and fold so that it hides the keyboard, for use in touch-only mode.
4) iMacs will get thinner, and their screens will be detachable. Since the screen contains the entire computer, the stand is just basically a brainless dock.
5) Since Mac Pro desktops have external monitors that are permanently vertical, it needs a new way to implement touch. I think Apple will follow Wacom’s Cintiq model, which is essentially using a wireless touch-screen as an input device. The trick Apple has up its sleeve is allowing people to use their Touch-enabled iMacs, MacBooks, and iPads as this input device for the Mac Pro.
More thoughts about the evolution of the OSX & iOS over here on my blog:
http://www.derekmartin.ca/2010/10/27/apple-the-road-ahead-part-3-of-3/
Apple have spent the last few years making a more obvious distinction between their consumer and professional computers. When I bought my PM G5 in 2005, it was the cutting edge. Provided I don’t feel the need to upgrade my copy of Creative Suite 5, I still haven’t maxed it out. Add an SSD and another 10Gb RAM and it will keep working for a few years’ time. I have no need for the power of a Mac Pro and only hardware failure will nudge me towards one.
About a year after I bought the G5, we upgraded several 8 – 10 year old PM G4′s in the studio to the first Intel iMacs. For our graphic designers, they were perfect – a good, non-glossy 20″ monitor, dual core processors and a few Gigs of RAM. They absolutely blew away the previous machines, and for that matter, the early dual-G5′s we had bought for the more advanced designers two years previously. And all for $1000 a machine!
What strikes me is that now, the only option would be Mac Pros for at least double the price. It has taken till 2010 for any of the consumer Macs to be capable of outperforming my G5 (specifically, the quad-core i5 and i7 27″ iMac). Also, it seems Apple have drawn a line in the sand and declared that pro users should only use Mac Pros or MacBook Pros. I imagine that any proposed enhanced iOS would be placed on iMacs, MacBooks, MB Airs and Minis. OS X will continue to be supported on professional Macs for users who have no use for iLife, GarageBand or the Mac App Store. It will become a legacy OS that continues to use the latest Intel chips.
I would imagine all other Macs might eventually go to the successors of the A4. If the 1GHz A4 in the iPad can do all it does today, imagine what four of them and 8Gb RAM could do in a Mac Mini!
All that worries me is the possibility that in 10 years time, Apple will be entirely a consumer electronics company, and us professional users will find ourselves back in the world of Windows. But, looking on the bright side: if I can still work on my G5 after 5 years and earn money from it, maybe my first Mac Pro will last that long!
@Mark 2000, @Billy Gray, @Ken, @RD: You’re right, the “silencer” utility is a poor choice for an example of neat products the Mac App Store will help monetize. Apple monitors and keeps statistics of crash reports; rumor has it they see too many crashes stemming from overly clever hacks. BTW, and not to re-ignite a controversy, the lead offender is rumored to be Flash crashing Safari.
This said, there is no dearth of real opportunities, ranging from specialized editors such as BBedit, Website building, music, video, education…
@Eddie: You ask an important question. Will Apple allow ways to buy/install software other than the Mac App Store. Steve Jobs said yes indeed, no iPhone App Store exclusivity, no need to jailbreak your Mac. Whether this will apply to an hypothetical “Mac” based on an iOS derivative, we know we don’t know
Apple’s just building the grounds for a major transition, starting probably with MacOS X 10.8 if it doesn’t get superseded by a variant of iOS by then. The Mac App store will provide a necessary layer of abstraction so that handling porting and transferring the apps from one OS flavor to another would become easy. Then the underlying OS won’t matter much and it will be replaced by something else. All they need as you correctly said is ‘integrate’ and sooner or later the ability to install third-party apps or tinker with the system will be removed.
@TektonikShift, Kyderdog, Tom.
There is no doubt that iTunes suffers from both a crises of identity, serving books, TV Shows, Music, now social, and much more.
While some aspects of these implementations are magical (genius, the integrated app store, generally easy syncing), the various types of media become difficult to manage when they’re muddled togethe in one library.
And, when you have a massive library, the use of XML makes the performance unbearable.
I now have two libraries on the go, neither of which can sync with the other and one of which has no room for video on the HD. Apple will soon need to find a method to support each user’s growing library besides larger hard drives.
Hey OS X gets a software repository – Linux has had this forever. Nice to gt something similar now for all my OS X app downloads too 8)
Linux has also had the ability to cross platforms, but the reall powerful desktop apps need integration with hardware, video, mice, printers, removeable drives, common boot loaders etc. This has kept desktop on Intel x86 architecture. But making a common hardware platform popular enough that it attacts another competent OS, then it can take off.
Flash was the killr for me on PPC and 64 bit linux systems. It wasn’t avaialble on those architectures for a long time. Now that there is another common platform that also wont run flash, more sites are using open alternatives. It makes it feasible to have a full desktop on any architecure again 8)
A system like AppBuilder for OpenSuse would be nice. Send code up, crank the handle and out churns a binary for all the architectures supported. The package then can be added to the repository, (app Store) and the right one downloaded for the OS on that device.
As long as the app store isnt the ONLY way to get apps on the desktop this will be fine. In Linux, you can just downlaod the packages manually from anywhere you can find them.
I imagine though that if you give Apple the right to deploy your app, you wont be allowed to undercut them on price.
Something about the way you format this blog–the haphazard images, the random bold and underlined sections–makes it painful to read. It’s like an 8th grade essay. I was tempted to copy the the whole thing (because the subject is indeed fascinating) into a TextEdit box, but alas, when you try to click and drag, you find the sidebars get selected too.
What a nightmare.
Many others already pointed out that your startup sound app likely wouldn’t be approved… though I couldn’t help but notice that they were tossing out assumptions without bothering to check.
So I took a few seconds to downloaded the app and glanced at it with the Suspicious Package QL plugin. It does indeed include both a kernel extension (kxt) and a startup item; and it also requires escalation to root priveleges to install.
Cool app, but certainly not App Store friendly.
@Mike:
Hit the “reader” button in Safari!
Not sure about the premise here, you all should keep in mind that OSX and iOS are the same family tree, iOS is built using OSX just different libraries and compiled for ARM instead of X86!
The more interesting question is what should the updated finder or replacement application look like?
@Eddie and @JLGassée:
I don’t think Apple will ever go on a strict AppStore-only model on the desktop.
Forcing all the users and businesses whose needs don’t match the store policies into a land of unsupported hacks looks like a PITA with few real benefits.
What I see is future OS release defaulting to a sanitized mode (appstore apps only and limited file system access), with a switch somewhere to enable full access.
A bit like the current “enable root user” preference.
Now that I’m writing this, it also comes to my mind that a tipical Apple way to manage this could involve upselling customers to the “pro” models in their line up.
Like, here’s the new MacBook, cheap but AppStore only, and here’s the MacBook Pro, expensive but with an officially supported “full access” version of the OS. =)
@Jean-Louis Gassée “Operating systems don’t age well”
Not sure about this ether, Unix has aged very well. they key is that the OS is small and extensible.
iTunes should be integrated into the finder/OS so that it’s always available and and it’s capabilities are provided to developers to interact with.
Ken Berger, you seem unsure about many things. Why not come back and comment when you are sure of something?
I still think BeOS is a great OS and still have a machine to run it on. I have been following Haiku OS. You had some great stuff before it’s time.
Imagine a Macbook Air with glass display on both side of the open clam shell, no physical keyboard, all touchscreen…. that’s the future of the macbook….
@Richard — all glass and no physical keyboard is definitely not the future of the MacBook. Why? MacBooks are for creating content (audio/video/text/code). Much of content creation requires typing. Typing is fastest when you can:
a) use all 10 fingers, and
b) type without needing to look where the ‘keys’ are (i.e. touch-typing)
Glass does not let you touch-type, so it ain’t gonna be the only input mechanism for the MacBook. That’s what the iPad & iPhone are for.
This paragraph was pure literary genius. Thanks!
“OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning—and in the market—the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.”
After you left Apple, they made the same CPU gamble as you’ve proposed – that the Pentium had too much baggage that it could not possibly outrun the bright future of the PowerPC roadmap.
Well, we know how that story unfolded.
I’m not saying history will repeat itself, but maybe one should hedge his bet against the massive x86 market.
Nice article. Quite useful…
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A beekeeper’s hat is basically a wide-brimmed hat and runs around the entire circumference around your head. This hat is then a veil around the fixed points of the face to get. Without the veil, the beekeeper is like any other, has other functions that lead outside the house. The beekeeper’s hat is an essential piece of clothing during the bee. It protects the face and head beekeeper bees. This reduces the risk of bee stings on the face when it comes to the hive and the honey harvest and harvest.
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