Even I didn't realize the max transfer rate was "that" low.
Yeah, but Anand doesn't address a few things. Like how peripheral TB devices don't have Intel chips in them which means that the iDevices could be used as such (assuming it's something Intel legally allows), how NAND flash transfer rates will increase over time, and, perhaps most important to me, how TB allows for 10W instead of 5W for USB so that charging from a Mac would be as fast a a wall outlet.
Amazing how everyone is bitching about the baseless 'iOSification' of OSX, yet Microsoft is slapping a tablet/phone interface as the default for a desktop.
The day my living room and entertainment setup is one TV (with all content via a subscription package), no extra boxes or wires, one TV remote and separate dedicated hardware gaming controllers is the day we can welcome the next 50 years of the living room.
i agree with you.
exactly same thing i wrote just yesterday for the same thing that apple HDTV can bring game console and subscriptions and app store on it and there will be no need for the other set-top boxes for most of the people?
exactly same thing i wrote just yesterday for the same thing that apple HDTV can bring game console and subscriptions and app store on it and there will be no need for the other set-top boxes for most of the people?
That's an interesting dilemma from Apple. Go the whole way and make their own HDTV (tons of people would buy it just because it's not Sony/ Samsung/ Pioneer/ Etc.
Or roll out AppleTV 3/4 with apps and reach out to a very broad base. Most HDTVs have about 3 or 4 HDMI inputs now so another set top box is slightly annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
That's an interesting dilemma from Apple. Go the whole way and make their own HDTV (tons of people would buy it just because it's not Sony/ Samsung/ Pioneer/ Etc.
Or roll out AppleTV 3/4 with apps and reach out to a very broad base. Most HDTVs have about 3 or 4 HDMI inputs now so another set top box is slightly annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
Whoa... a blast from the past. Where have you been for the last 2-3 years?
I don't see that happening or how it makes sense. Why do I need to have the iOS UIs on my Mac or have the Mac Aqua UI hidden in within every iDevice? You don't there is simply no need for them to converse into one OS.
Now convergent aspects across their different OSes is another story and how iOS started. They scaled back Mac OS X to a core version of OS X that all system could use then diverged iOS from that. They've since shared back and forth along the way with the commonality of iOS-based devices clearly being pushed to the Mac to make it more familiar.
Dang! I was mostly finished with a long post to you on this when Safari crashed, and I lost it all. Too frustrated to attempt to recreate it now. Sigh!
I don't know if you read Daring Fireball but John Gruber got a private event last week and said this:
I wholeheartedly believe that is the absolutely correct way to view this.
Ah, but I doubt the interpretation we're seeing from Gruber is the correct one. He makes his mistakes in understanding as does everyone who is such thinking in a narrowly defined path.
I'm not saying that all these devices will look exactly the same on screen. I never said that. There must be, and will be differences because of the difference in screen size and processing power.
It seems that those who don't agree with the idea of a merger are thinking that the iPhone and the Mac will have exactly the same screen UI, and underlying methodologies of use. Not so!
Of course we'll see more on the Mac, and have more available. It's the smooth graduation between the devices that's going to be in the merger, not an exact duplication.
Have you ever wanted to upload a picture to a website using your iPhone or iPad? You can't do it without a special app specifically for that website. That is why Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, etc. sites that use a lot of uploaded photos had to have their own app. I don't think iOS/iCloud file methodologies are necessarily an improvement over traditional file management. I would rather have access to the file system in addition to cloud storage.
I believe the mistake being made is the assumption that Apple will eliminate all of the features that OS X has, and replace them with the simpler ones from iOS. I don't see that happening. What I do see is them doing things to make it easier and simpler for the average user. To the average user, a computer can be a nightmare. How many really need, or use all of those sophisticated features? Very few. Even saving is beyond most people much of the time. And backups? How many people respond with more than a; "What?" when you ask about it?
But despite hiding the user library from casual users, who no doubt screw it up, which is why Apple did it, there's no reason to believe that they will remove the ability from sophisticated users. It may just get a bit more hidden.
You are talking about two completely OS philosphies. It's one thing to have iOS for iPhone/Touch and iOS for iPad create universal apps because the code base is so similar. That's just an app with the same basic, primary I/O foundation that is CocoaTouch.
Mac OS X uses Aqua and even though Apple is trying to make them look familiar they still act like a desktop OS app, not an embedded OS app that can't be windowed or resized. It's really just an iOS UI coating over Mac OS X Aqua, but it's not pulling CocoaTouch onto Mac OS and dropping Aqua, hence it's not a converging OS... jut converging aspects within the OS.
And that's just some minor surface points. That isn't even the core ways in which the OS functions. iOS doesn't need drivers for all those Mac ports on the side. It doesn't need drivers for USB connected printers and hard drives. There is a world of difference in the core of the OS that was stripped away to make iOS because it's not needed and never will be.
Bottom line: Apple hasn't dropped the Mac or dumbed it down. What they've done is add continuity between iOS and Mac OS which makes sense as their iOS devices are used by a lot more people than Macs. This isn't Apple dropping the Mac, this is Apple focusing on the Mac. Expect some major Mac HW updates as they are clearly readying to take the platform to a whole... 'nother... level.
Solly, really, on this issue, you're really missing the point. No one is saying that there is a need to put Cocoatouch into OS X, though you can bet Apple is experimenting with doing just that. Most non technical people would define what an OS is by which programs it runs. If it runs the same programs, it's the same OS, details of differences notwithstanding.
That's why, despite what MS says, Metro on ARM is NOT Win 8, no matter what they say.
But if Apple gets to make a universal app that would install across all their devices, even if there would be some UI and functionality differences, it would be considered to be the same OS. And please don't continue to say that universal apps should only work across the uPhone and the iPad. We've had universal (I'm struggling to call programs from the Mac, apps, but am having a tough time of it) apps for many years from Apple. It's nothing new to them, and they're pretty familiar with how to do it.
I remember that we didn't have video on iPods either, and never would?oops!
Solly, really, on this issue, you're really missing the point.!
You can't buy ML from the App Store and install it on all Macs and iDevices alike then the OSes aren't converged. They aren't one! All you're talking about is having some features converged between two very distinct OSes. You have a converged Darwin core, some converged foundations and framework, some converged code and UI elements for familiarity reasons, and some converged SDK offerings. If we see an SDK that will allow devs to make universal apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac then that would still be a converged app, not converged OSes.
Testing is normal for such a large company. If Intel was just sitting on this, that would be one thing. I'd like to see how the two compare a couple years from now. By that I mean chip for chip at that time, not what Intel makes today versus what ARM might be able to make later years later. Some of the math posted on this in the past has been particularly bad.
The major flaw with this logic is that you don't know how these factors would look if you required a chip that would perform comparable to the current Air. At this point we still don't have much beyond speculation and hype, so it's not really a guarantee at this point.
In terms of pricing, power consumption, performance, etc. ARM's current competition in that area has involved atom chips. Should you wish to scale up an ARM chip to be appropriate for an OSX based machine, you'd no longer be looking at such a cheap price, and you are unlikely to see the price charged by Apple fall due to this.
Compared to x86 based chips, ARM based SoC's, which contain almost the entire thing, are so very cheap, that Apple could, if they wanted to, include it within every Mac. That would give them 100% compatibility with iOS apps, just needing the touch input, which Apple is increasing the capability of on their hardware on a regular basis.
This is certain,y possible without compromising the performance of the device. There is a lot that could be done here.
Yeah, but Anand doesn't address a few things. Like how peripheral TB devices don't have Intel chips in them which means that the iDevices could be used as such (assuming it's something Intel legally allows), how NAND flash transfer rates will increase over time, and, perhaps most important to me, how TB allows for 10W instead of 5W for USB so that charging from a Mac would be as fast a a wall outlet.
The real problem is that TB is an extension to the Express bus, as I think I mentioned a day ago. No Express Buss in an iOs device would preclude its inclusion. Nothing else really matters.
Interestingly, "Metro" isn't too bad on an Xbox360. Kinda fresh.
Personally, I hate how it's implemented. It wouldn't be so bad if the software advertisements weren't the largest part of the visual real estate, but they are. If this is how Windows 8 and a Windows 8 phone are going to look, I'll pass.
Anyway. re: OS X and iOS integration dumbing up/down. They're exactly the same OS with a different "windowing manager" if you will. What do you think people develop iOS apps on? When you run the emulator it's running the application native on OS X, using the native API's, of which the "iOS" emulator sits on top of.
In some ways we are going back to the days of Apple II and DOS where only one application is ever "running in the foreground", just we're doing it in a smarter way now. Windows and Mac early versions were all about MDI (Multiple Document Interface) but applications have steadily moved away from this, to multiple applications or tabs in the same interface.
I don't know about everyone else, but I absolutely hate running everything full screen. Back in the day when when I had a 14" monitor and ran things 640x480, full screen was desireable, but with every bump up in screen size, I've kept things fitting to the same 800-1280 width, but mostly the full height of the screen short of the bottom unusable inch of the screen (which was only 16 pixels back in windows 95, and never done on the mac platform until MacOS X)
Someone, somewhere along the line must have realized that the "icons on the bottom of the screen" is inherently useless, most people only run one or two things at the same time, why waste all this screen real estate? The apps that require this functionality will have it, where as things that don't, won't (like games.) In fact for games, the argument could be made that you shouldn't be able to switch away from the game. If you need access to the web browser or social media during the game, it should be integrated better into the game API's rather than let the other application hijack the state of the game by swapping it to disk. We see some of this already with Steam.
I don't know about others, but I find that if I'm doing "Work", I need access to like 20 tabs of a web browser (safari, chrome or firefox, it doesn't matter) plus something that acts as a notepad(not necessarily a full word processor,) calculator, plus whatever central application I do work with (for today it's terminal/SSH, other days it's Visual Studio, XCode, or some other IDE.) When I play games however, I close everything but the web browser that is running google and twitter (no apps.) However if I were to be using an iPhone or iPad, I wouldn't be doing this at all. No, I'd be using the iPad for the social media and as a separate "web browser tab", while still doing work on the Mac or PC.
But that's what I work on right now, sometimes working on Photoshop or doing video work demands things that are impossible to do with an iPad, and that's primarily because the i/o on the iPad is too slow and small to be useful. This is unlikely to change until memristors or some other solid state storage comes out. My needs are not the average person. I consider my parents the average user for a PC and my grandparents and nephew's the average user of an iPad.
Ever watch a 3 year old play with an iPad? Adults don't give children enough credit. They can find the app, run it and play the game. Where as the same kid had to get his daddy to find and run the game on the android phone. Likewise an iPhone and iPad can replace dozens of toys and board games that have limited interest. A 3 year old can use an iPad and not want to throw it out of frustration, I think apple has succeeded in making it easy enough to use.
If Apple is dumbing down OS X, I'm fine with it as long as they aren't removing the advanced functionality altogether. I don't see the command line going anywhere.
Well, to be accurate, it began as the UI on the demised Zune HD. Then it was extended to be usable on a phone, and so we see it as the UI for WP7. And now, MS is extending it again for Win8.
It's why they SAY that WP7 won't be used on tablets. But we know that that's not exactly true. The big difference is that the kernel from Win 7, with modifications is now in Metro as well as the Desktop in Win 8. So when they put Metro on ARM, they're really doing what they should have done from the beginning, but didn't have the time for, which is finally dumping CE, which Win Mobile, and then WP7 is based upon.
Good reason to dump it, as it is a simple OS which in no way is equal to iOs or Android. That is the reason why MS stated that WP 7 wouldn't go on tablets. It's not strong enough for tablets. It would be at a great disadvantage, in that it can't use higher resolutions than 800 x 480, or multiple core processors, which the upcoming Apollo, which will be WP 8, with that same kernel from Win 8, which, of course, being that it's from Windows (the real Windows), it can handle.
But Metro, the UI, and programming model, is most definitely from their music player and their phone.
You can't buy ML from the App Store and install it on all Macs and iDevices alike then the OSes aren't converged. They aren't one! All you're talking about is having some features converged between two very distinct OSes. You have a converged Darwin core, some converged foundations and framework, some converged code and UI elements for familiarity reasons, and some converged SDK offerings. If we see an SDK that will allow devs to make universal apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac then that would still be a converged app, not converged OSes.
We don't know what Apple is planning over time. I'm not talking about what is possible now, but what could be possible several years from now. And you're talking from a techie viewpoint, which isn't relevant. It doesn't matter whether all of the underlying technologies are present in all devices, I've already said that they won't be. What matters for a converged OS is that they accept the same apps. A universal app would be required not because of the OS difference, but because of the difference between ARM and x86, which is an entirely different matter. It's like the PPC vs x86. It has nothing to do with the OS at all.
OS X is highly portable; always has been. In its lifetime (including NeXTSTEP), it has run on M68K, SPARC, HP-PA, Intel x86, PowerPC, Intel x86 again, and now ARM. The principle of fat binaries is also well-known: in the recent past there have been x86/PPC fat binaries, in the more distant past there were quad fat binaries, even.
Apple would be stupid to not guard this hardware agnosticism closely and they probably have experimental builds running on different hardware platforms, internally.
If Intel suddenly turn up with an Atom CPU that is a viable competitor to ARM's offerings, Apple can us it in iOS devices a heartbeat. For developers, it would mean a mere recompile; for users, it would be entirely transparent. Same for the scenario where ARM (or any other CPU foundry, really) produced a viable desktop CPU to rival Intel's offerings, although the ability to run Windows on a Mac would be limited to Intel based macs.
That's what Tim Cook is really saying, here. You might read into that what you want to hear, from ARM-based Macs to Intel-based iDevices, but he's really not saying anything other than, "we're keeping our options open."
Personally, I'd see CPU divergence happening for iOS sooner than OS X, since the (corporate) market dominance of Windows is still a force to be reckoned with and the ability to run Windows natively is a huge boon to Mac sales, while in the iOS space there is no such competition. But there is certainly something to be said for an ARM-based Mac "lite" that is even smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient that Apple;s current low-end offerings (Mac Mini/MacBook Air).
You can't buy ML from the App Store and install it on all Macs and iDevices alike then the OSes aren't converged. They aren't one! All you're talking about is having some features converged between two very distinct OSes. You have a converged Darwin core, some converged foundations and framework, some converged code and UI elements for familiarity reasons, and some converged SDK offerings. If we see an SDK that will allow devs to make universal apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac then that would still be a converged app, not converged OSes.
We don't know what Apple is planning over time. I'm not talking about what is possible now, but what could be possible several years from now. And you're talking from a techie viewpoint, which isn't relevant. It doesn't matter whether all of the underlying technologies are present in all devices, I've already said that they won't be. What matters for a converged OS is that they accept the same apps. A universal app would be required not because of the OS difference, but because of the difference between ARM and x86, which is an entirely different matter. It's like the PPC vs x86. It has nothing to do with the OS at all. We could call it Fat Binaries, as it's been called in the past, but the concept of it working on everything to me means it a universal app.
Comments
Anand makes a solid argument as to why iDevices won't get TB.
Good read!
Thx for the link!
Even I didn't realize the max transfer rate was "that" low.
Yeah, but Anand doesn't address a few things. Like how peripheral TB devices don't have Intel chips in them which means that the iDevices could be used as such (assuming it's something Intel legally allows), how NAND flash transfer rates will increase over time, and, perhaps most important to me, how TB allows for 10W instead of 5W for USB so that charging from a Mac would be as fast a a wall outlet.
Just build an XMac to run it on!
Amazing how everyone is bitching about the baseless 'iOSification' of OSX, yet Microsoft is slapping a tablet/phone interface as the default for a desktop.
Metro isn't a "tablet/phone" UI.
The day my living room and entertainment setup is one TV (with all content via a subscription package), no extra boxes or wires, one TV remote and separate dedicated hardware gaming controllers is the day we can welcome the next 50 years of the living room.
i agree with you.
exactly same thing i wrote just yesterday for the same thing that apple HDTV can bring game console and subscriptions and app store on it and there will be no need for the other set-top boxes for most of the people?
Metro isn't a "tablet/phone" UI.
Interestingly, "Metro" isn't too bad on an Xbox360. Kinda fresh.
i agree with you.
exactly same thing i wrote just yesterday for the same thing that apple HDTV can bring game console and subscriptions and app store on it and there will be no need for the other set-top boxes for most of the people?
That's an interesting dilemma from Apple. Go the whole way and make their own HDTV (tons of people would buy it just because it's not Sony/ Samsung/ Pioneer/ Etc.
Or roll out AppleTV 3/4 with apps and reach out to a very broad base. Most HDTVs have about 3 or 4 HDMI inputs now so another set top box is slightly annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
That's an interesting dilemma from Apple. Go the whole way and make their own HDTV (tons of people would buy it just because it's not Sony/ Samsung/ Pioneer/ Etc.
Or roll out AppleTV 3/4 with apps and reach out to a very broad base. Most HDTVs have about 3 or 4 HDMI inputs now so another set top box is slightly annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
Whoa... a blast from the past. Where have you been for the last 2-3 years?
I don't see that happening or how it makes sense. Why do I need to have the iOS UIs on my Mac or have the Mac Aqua UI hidden in within every iDevice? You don't there is simply no need for them to converse into one OS.
Now convergent aspects across their different OSes is another story and how iOS started. They scaled back Mac OS X to a core version of OS X that all system could use then diverged iOS from that. They've since shared back and forth along the way with the commonality of iOS-based devices clearly being pushed to the Mac to make it more familiar.
Dang! I was mostly finished with a long post to you on this when Safari crashed, and I lost it all. Too frustrated to attempt to recreate it now. Sigh!
I don't know if you read Daring Fireball but John Gruber got a private event last week and said this:
I wholeheartedly believe that is the absolutely correct way to view this.
Ah, but I doubt the interpretation we're seeing from Gruber is the correct one. He makes his mistakes in understanding as does everyone who is such thinking in a narrowly defined path.
I'm not saying that all these devices will look exactly the same on screen. I never said that. There must be, and will be differences because of the difference in screen size and processing power.
It seems that those who don't agree with the idea of a merger are thinking that the iPhone and the Mac will have exactly the same screen UI, and underlying methodologies of use. Not so!
Of course we'll see more on the Mac, and have more available. It's the smooth graduation between the devices that's going to be in the merger, not an exact duplication.
Have you ever wanted to upload a picture to a website using your iPhone or iPad? You can't do it without a special app specifically for that website. That is why Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, etc. sites that use a lot of uploaded photos had to have their own app. I don't think iOS/iCloud file methodologies are necessarily an improvement over traditional file management. I would rather have access to the file system in addition to cloud storage.
I believe the mistake being made is the assumption that Apple will eliminate all of the features that OS X has, and replace them with the simpler ones from iOS. I don't see that happening. What I do see is them doing things to make it easier and simpler for the average user. To the average user, a computer can be a nightmare. How many really need, or use all of those sophisticated features? Very few. Even saving is beyond most people much of the time. And backups? How many people respond with more than a; "What?" when you ask about it?
But despite hiding the user library from casual users, who no doubt screw it up, which is why Apple did it, there's no reason to believe that they will remove the ability from sophisticated users. It may just get a bit more hidden.
You are talking about two completely OS philosphies. It's one thing to have iOS for iPhone/Touch and iOS for iPad create universal apps because the code base is so similar. That's just an app with the same basic, primary I/O foundation that is CocoaTouch.
Mac OS X uses Aqua and even though Apple is trying to make them look familiar they still act like a desktop OS app, not an embedded OS app that can't be windowed or resized. It's really just an iOS UI coating over Mac OS X Aqua, but it's not pulling CocoaTouch onto Mac OS and dropping Aqua, hence it's not a converging OS... jut converging aspects within the OS.
And that's just some minor surface points. That isn't even the core ways in which the OS functions. iOS doesn't need drivers for all those Mac ports on the side. It doesn't need drivers for USB connected printers and hard drives. There is a world of difference in the core of the OS that was stripped away to make iOS because it's not needed and never will be.
Bottom line: Apple hasn't dropped the Mac or dumbed it down. What they've done is add continuity between iOS and Mac OS which makes sense as their iOS devices are used by a lot more people than Macs. This isn't Apple dropping the Mac, this is Apple focusing on the Mac. Expect some major Mac HW updates as they are clearly readying to take the platform to a whole... 'nother... level.
Solly, really, on this issue, you're really missing the point. No one is saying that there is a need to put Cocoatouch into OS X, though you can bet Apple is experimenting with doing just that. Most non technical people would define what an OS is by which programs it runs. If it runs the same programs, it's the same OS, details of differences notwithstanding.
That's why, despite what MS says, Metro on ARM is NOT Win 8, no matter what they say.
But if Apple gets to make a universal app that would install across all their devices, even if there would be some UI and functionality differences, it would be considered to be the same OS. And please don't continue to say that universal apps should only work across the uPhone and the iPad. We've had universal (I'm struggling to call programs from the Mac, apps, but am having a tough time of it) apps for many years from Apple. It's nothing new to them, and they're pretty familiar with how to do it.
I remember that we didn't have video on iPods either, and never would?oops!
Solly, really, on this issue, you're really missing the point.!
You can't buy ML from the App Store and install it on all Macs and iDevices alike then the OSes aren't converged. They aren't one! All you're talking about is having some features converged between two very distinct OSes. You have a converged Darwin core, some converged foundations and framework, some converged code and UI elements for familiarity reasons, and some converged SDK offerings. If we see an SDK that will allow devs to make universal apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac then that would still be a converged app, not converged OSes.
Testing is normal for such a large company. If Intel was just sitting on this, that would be one thing. I'd like to see how the two compare a couple years from now. By that I mean chip for chip at that time, not what Intel makes today versus what ARM might be able to make later years later. Some of the math posted on this in the past has been particularly bad.
The major flaw with this logic is that you don't know how these factors would look if you required a chip that would perform comparable to the current Air. At this point we still don't have much beyond speculation and hype, so it's not really a guarantee at this point.
In terms of pricing, power consumption, performance, etc. ARM's current competition in that area has involved atom chips. Should you wish to scale up an ARM chip to be appropriate for an OSX based machine, you'd no longer be looking at such a cheap price, and you are unlikely to see the price charged by Apple fall due to this.
Compared to x86 based chips, ARM based SoC's, which contain almost the entire thing, are so very cheap, that Apple could, if they wanted to, include it within every Mac. That would give them 100% compatibility with iOS apps, just needing the touch input, which Apple is increasing the capability of on their hardware on a regular basis.
This is certain,y possible without compromising the performance of the device. There is a lot that could be done here.
Yeah, but Anand doesn't address a few things. Like how peripheral TB devices don't have Intel chips in them which means that the iDevices could be used as such (assuming it's something Intel legally allows), how NAND flash transfer rates will increase over time, and, perhaps most important to me, how TB allows for 10W instead of 5W for USB so that charging from a Mac would be as fast a a wall outlet.
The real problem is that TB is an extension to the Express bus, as I think I mentioned a day ago. No Express Buss in an iOs device would preclude its inclusion. Nothing else really matters.
Interestingly, "Metro" isn't too bad on an Xbox360. Kinda fresh.
Personally, I hate how it's implemented. It wouldn't be so bad if the software advertisements weren't the largest part of the visual real estate, but they are. If this is how Windows 8 and a Windows 8 phone are going to look, I'll pass.
Anyway. re: OS X and iOS integration dumbing up/down. They're exactly the same OS with a different "windowing manager" if you will. What do you think people develop iOS apps on? When you run the emulator it's running the application native on OS X, using the native API's, of which the "iOS" emulator sits on top of.
In some ways we are going back to the days of Apple II and DOS where only one application is ever "running in the foreground", just we're doing it in a smarter way now. Windows and Mac early versions were all about MDI (Multiple Document Interface) but applications have steadily moved away from this, to multiple applications or tabs in the same interface.
I don't know about everyone else, but I absolutely hate running everything full screen. Back in the day when when I had a 14" monitor and ran things 640x480, full screen was desireable, but with every bump up in screen size, I've kept things fitting to the same 800-1280 width, but mostly the full height of the screen short of the bottom unusable inch of the screen (which was only 16 pixels back in windows 95, and never done on the mac platform until MacOS X)
Someone, somewhere along the line must have realized that the "icons on the bottom of the screen" is inherently useless, most people only run one or two things at the same time, why waste all this screen real estate? The apps that require this functionality will have it, where as things that don't, won't (like games.) In fact for games, the argument could be made that you shouldn't be able to switch away from the game. If you need access to the web browser or social media during the game, it should be integrated better into the game API's rather than let the other application hijack the state of the game by swapping it to disk. We see some of this already with Steam.
I don't know about others, but I find that if I'm doing "Work", I need access to like 20 tabs of a web browser (safari, chrome or firefox, it doesn't matter) plus something that acts as a notepad(not necessarily a full word processor,) calculator, plus whatever central application I do work with (for today it's terminal/SSH, other days it's Visual Studio, XCode, or some other IDE.) When I play games however, I close everything but the web browser that is running google and twitter (no apps.) However if I were to be using an iPhone or iPad, I wouldn't be doing this at all. No, I'd be using the iPad for the social media and as a separate "web browser tab", while still doing work on the Mac or PC.
But that's what I work on right now, sometimes working on Photoshop or doing video work demands things that are impossible to do with an iPad, and that's primarily because the i/o on the iPad is too slow and small to be useful. This is unlikely to change until memristors or some other solid state storage comes out. My needs are not the average person. I consider my parents the average user for a PC and my grandparents and nephew's the average user of an iPad.
Ever watch a 3 year old play with an iPad? Adults don't give children enough credit. They can find the app, run it and play the game. Where as the same kid had to get his daddy to find and run the game on the android phone. Likewise an iPhone and iPad can replace dozens of toys and board games that have limited interest. A 3 year old can use an iPad and not want to throw it out of frustration, I think apple has succeeded in making it easy enough to use.
If Apple is dumbing down OS X, I'm fine with it as long as they aren't removing the advanced functionality altogether. I don't see the command line going anywhere.
Metro isn't a "tablet/phone" UI.
Well, to be accurate, it began as the UI on the demised Zune HD. Then it was extended to be usable on a phone, and so we see it as the UI for WP7. And now, MS is extending it again for Win8.
It's why they SAY that WP7 won't be used on tablets. But we know that that's not exactly true. The big difference is that the kernel from Win 7, with modifications is now in Metro as well as the Desktop in Win 8. So when they put Metro on ARM, they're really doing what they should have done from the beginning, but didn't have the time for, which is finally dumping CE, which Win Mobile, and then WP7 is based upon.
Good reason to dump it, as it is a simple OS which in no way is equal to iOs or Android. That is the reason why MS stated that WP 7 wouldn't go on tablets. It's not strong enough for tablets. It would be at a great disadvantage, in that it can't use higher resolutions than 800 x 480, or multiple core processors, which the upcoming Apollo, which will be WP 8, with that same kernel from Win 8, which, of course, being that it's from Windows (the real Windows), it can handle.
But Metro, the UI, and programming model, is most definitely from their music player and their phone.
You can't buy ML from the App Store and install it on all Macs and iDevices alike then the OSes aren't converged. They aren't one! All you're talking about is having some features converged between two very distinct OSes. You have a converged Darwin core, some converged foundations and framework, some converged code and UI elements for familiarity reasons, and some converged SDK offerings. If we see an SDK that will allow devs to make universal apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac then that would still be a converged app, not converged OSes.
We don't know what Apple is planning over time. I'm not talking about what is possible now, but what could be possible several years from now. And you're talking from a techie viewpoint, which isn't relevant. It doesn't matter whether all of the underlying technologies are present in all devices, I've already said that they won't be. What matters for a converged OS is that they accept the same apps. A universal app would be required not because of the OS difference, but because of the difference between ARM and x86, which is an entirely different matter. It's like the PPC vs x86. It has nothing to do with the OS at all.
Apple would be stupid to not guard this hardware agnosticism closely and they probably have experimental builds running on different hardware platforms, internally.
If Intel suddenly turn up with an Atom CPU that is a viable competitor to ARM's offerings, Apple can us it in iOS devices a heartbeat. For developers, it would mean a mere recompile; for users, it would be entirely transparent. Same for the scenario where ARM (or any other CPU foundry, really) produced a viable desktop CPU to rival Intel's offerings, although the ability to run Windows on a Mac would be limited to Intel based macs.
That's what Tim Cook is really saying, here. You might read into that what you want to hear, from ARM-based Macs to Intel-based iDevices, but he's really not saying anything other than, "we're keeping our options open."
Personally, I'd see CPU divergence happening for iOS sooner than OS X, since the (corporate) market dominance of Windows is still a force to be reckoned with and the ability to run Windows natively is a huge boon to Mac sales, while in the iOS space there is no such competition. But there is certainly something to be said for an ARM-based Mac "lite" that is even smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient that Apple;s current low-end offerings (Mac Mini/MacBook Air).
.tsooJ
You can't buy ML from the App Store and install it on all Macs and iDevices alike then the OSes aren't converged. They aren't one! All you're talking about is having some features converged between two very distinct OSes. You have a converged Darwin core, some converged foundations and framework, some converged code and UI elements for familiarity reasons, and some converged SDK offerings. If we see an SDK that will allow devs to make universal apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac then that would still be a converged app, not converged OSes.
We don't know what Apple is planning over time. I'm not talking about what is possible now, but what could be possible several years from now. And you're talking from a techie viewpoint, which isn't relevant. It doesn't matter whether all of the underlying technologies are present in all devices, I've already said that they won't be. What matters for a converged OS is that they accept the same apps. A universal app would be required not because of the OS difference, but because of the difference between ARM and x86, which is an entirely different matter. It's like the PPC vs x86. It has nothing to do with the OS at all. We could call it Fat Binaries, as it's been called in the past, but the concept of it working on everything to me means it a universal app.