I don't understand this article. From what I gathered, they want more interplay between their iOS devices and macOS. Is that a bad thing? Is restructuring the engineering teams to reflect that a bad thing? I really don't think so. This is just clickbait.
I doubt they'd go this route. The two systems are not comparable. Development on an actual Android or iOS tablet would feel really limiting. There are lots of applications where you still need the features you'd find in a desktop OS. Not just for devs, but photographers, designers and film editors. Trying to deprecate macos would be silly.
The article does make some good points. MacOS 10.9 was the last version I liked. Once they replaced expose with that terrible mission control, I started looking at tiling window managers and got into i3. I went back to Linux in a VM on macos for like a year before just building a real Linux box. .. then I ran Windows on the mac for games. :-P
I like that the article mentions Final Cut. Final Cut X was terrible. I used it for two projects and then dropped it. Resolve pretty much does everything I need it to do, although it's sad that the codebase for Final Cut 7 is now gone. That was a good editor and Apple pretty much killed it.
Point to how Apple is converging macOS and iOS features (the same way Windows is converging it's phone OS with it's PC and Console OS, and even Ubuntu dabbled with) and say it's the end of PCs.
Point to how ARM is going to upend x86 because ARM processors are getting more powerful even though ARM usage is going up everywhere from laptops to servers.
They just missed the part where you quote Steve Job on the subject to give it some "oomph"...
The headline should embrace the timeline on which it becomes relevant and say that "traditional laptops are becoming legacy hardware".
We're getting closer to a point where things like "Continuum" and "Lapdocks" might actually become feasible alternatives to laptops, but it's a long way off. This just feels like Apple (and Microsoft, see the news about Windows + Qualcomm) are starting to hedge their bets in the area.
It's nothing like "killing off laptops" in the near future.
I dont think it is that far off. The iPhone 7 today already provide performance pretty close to Macbook. By 2020, we should have a 5nm TSMC Ax SoC. We already have 8GB single package LPDDR4 on 21nm today, and targeting 12nm by 2020. Basically the 2020 iPhone will very likely be more powerful then today's Macbook, or even some of today's Macbook Pro.
"In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team."
There are a number of problems with this line of reasoning:
1. That reorganization started years ago, in the wake of Scott Forstall's departure in late 2012
2. The previous organization was, in my opinion, much more detrimental to macOS, with the iOS organization operating as a roach motel, where code and engineers move into, but never back out again (My perception was that this was Scott's doing, but YMMV).
3. There is no longer a dedicated iOS operating system team either, so I don't see how that reorganization can be seen as deemphasizing macOS.
4. With iOS accounting for the vast majority of revenue, an arrangement to share infrastructure tends to be advantageous to macOS, if anything.
5. There may no longer be a macOS team, but there certainly still are engineers (and even smallish sub-teams) that are predominantly working on one platform or another.
My experience does not jive with this article. After many years of preferring Linux on the laptop, I am going back to the Apple ecosystem. With the right apps my iPad Pro is a great productivity device and after getting used to the keyboard my MacBook is just fine for local software development (I also use a 16 core 60GB VPS for a lot of my work). A bonus is that I feel that Apple has more respect for users' privacy since their business model is independent of collecting user data.
The article content doesn't really do the subject justice. The constant churn of the OS has caused a variety of legacy software problems where now I run older versions of OS X in a VM in order to support software that can't run in new versions. Some of that software I simply don't want to pay for no new features (accounting software), and other software isn't going to be updated. This is software that worked with recent previous releases within the past couple of years. Meanwhile the same software of the same versions still run OK on Windows 7 (and 8 and 10), so Apple's backward compatibility support, API/ABI stability, isn't as good as on Windows.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] threadThe article does make some good points. MacOS 10.9 was the last version I liked. Once they replaced expose with that terrible mission control, I started looking at tiling window managers and got into i3. I went back to Linux in a VM on macos for like a year before just building a real Linux box. .. then I ran Windows on the mac for games. :-P
I like that the article mentions Final Cut. Final Cut X was terrible. I used it for two projects and then dropped it. Resolve pretty much does everything I need it to do, although it's sad that the codebase for Final Cut 7 is now gone. That was a good editor and Apple pretty much killed it.
The formula is always the same:
Point to how Apple is converging macOS and iOS features (the same way Windows is converging it's phone OS with it's PC and Console OS, and even Ubuntu dabbled with) and say it's the end of PCs.
Point to how ARM is going to upend x86 because ARM processors are getting more powerful even though ARM usage is going up everywhere from laptops to servers.
They just missed the part where you quote Steve Job on the subject to give it some "oomph"...
The headline should embrace the timeline on which it becomes relevant and say that "traditional laptops are becoming legacy hardware".
We're getting closer to a point where things like "Continuum" and "Lapdocks" might actually become feasible alternatives to laptops, but it's a long way off. This just feels like Apple (and Microsoft, see the news about Windows + Qualcomm) are starting to hedge their bets in the area.
It's nothing like "killing off laptops" in the near future.
There are a number of problems with this line of reasoning:
1. That reorganization started years ago, in the wake of Scott Forstall's departure in late 2012
2. The previous organization was, in my opinion, much more detrimental to macOS, with the iOS organization operating as a roach motel, where code and engineers move into, but never back out again (My perception was that this was Scott's doing, but YMMV).
3. There is no longer a dedicated iOS operating system team either, so I don't see how that reorganization can be seen as deemphasizing macOS.
4. With iOS accounting for the vast majority of revenue, an arrangement to share infrastructure tends to be advantageous to macOS, if anything.
5. There may no longer be a macOS team, but there certainly still are engineers (and even smallish sub-teams) that are predominantly working on one platform or another.