IMO, they need to start building iOS laptops and desktops. Why this hasn't happenned blows my mind.
The fact is 90% of the population does not need a power of an intel desktop. They just need an iOS devices that sync's seamlessly with their phone/tablet/watch.
Why isn't Apple doing this?
I'd love to replace my MacMini with an iOS desktop.
The most expensive part of most Mac's are the intel chips. Replace those $300 chips with a $50 A-series chip.
Are you asking for Mac with A-series chips or a Mac with A-series chips + iOS operating system. Because there's no way in hell I want iOS running on my Mac.
I basically asking for an iOS desktop. No touch screen. Mouse/keyboard input.
It does not have to run Mac programs, just iOS stuff.
Why not just ask for a desktop dock for an iPad Pro? As long as you can connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse with a few USB ports and usb-c, that's all you really need. Then millions could have their iOS PC wish for a few hundred bucks.
The current iPad Pros produce equivalent or higher Geekbench scores than some of their desktop counter parts.
IMO, they need to start building iOS laptops and desktops. Why this hasn't happenned blows my mind.
Because iOS is absolutely useless for serious productivity. Software is the bottleneck, not hardware.
Also, if they start supplying iOS laptops, their product offering is going to be super confusing and both OS'es start cannibalizing their products.
The moment Apple brings an iOS laptop is the moment I will (sadly) switch to Windows, because it would be a signal that they're killing of MacOS, which I think is far, far superior to iOS on desktop, for many reasons.
That's a lie. iOS is very productive.
95% of people just need a desktop to:
1. email 2. simple word processing 3. web 4. social media 5. shopping 6. online banking 7. watch and listen to media
iOS can easily do that at a very productive level.
Again stop thinking that most people need their desktop to run massive spreadsheets, write computer code, or render 10GB of graphics. They don't.
I agree that an iOS laptop isn't needed. But an iOS desktop is. Big time.
90% (actually more than that) can do all those things on an iPad. The number of households that "need" a computer sitting on a desk is dwindling.
My money is on a larger MacBook added to the mix and a retirement of the MacBook Air name (for now at least). As others have said, the "Air" model was supposed to be Apple's thin and light entry. It makes no sense for MacBook to be the T&L model and MBA be the middle of the lineup.
I expect that Apple will dump MagSafe from the MacBook Pro, but I hope I'm wrong. It's one of those nice touches that makes a MacBook a MacBook.
In any case, just announce them already! At this point I expect Apple will forgo an "event" and that's ok with me. I doubt the nightly news would get a MacBook-only event more than a moment of coverage in any case; the average viewer doesn't care about a slightly better laptop.
I'm certain that macOS itself runs fine on Apple's Ax series of chips. The problem is the software, which is currently all AMD64.
However on a cheaper, consumer device it should be possible to quite worrying about all the software, and just get the popular software running on ARM first. This can be done in the Mac App Store by developers uploading a low level intermediate object code instead of final apps, and letting the App Store do the final device compilation. This is what happens for iOS applications for a couple of years already. An x86 emulator can be used for other software, even if it's not as fast.
I would really like an A10X based MacBook personally. Of course, that A10X would need to include some more laptop-oriented features - a couple of USB 3.1r2 controllers for a start for 10 Gbps USB C ports. Then it needs all the USB controllers for keyboard, trackpad, camera and other internal USB devices. A few PCIe lanes for WiFi, SSD too.
Note that these aren't a lot more than what was in A9X already, and the logic for these parts isn't large either. The question is whether Apple do this for A10X, or wait for A11X.
And a 3.5mm headphone jack.
sog35 - sticking two A10s in doesn't "just work". That's not an option, the SoC does not include coherent SMP support for multiple A10s (because why include that on a phone SoC!). Better to hope for more cores and gpu capability in a single A10X.
IMO, they need to start building iOS laptops and desktops. Why this hasn't happenned blows my mind.
The fact is 90% of the population does not need a power of an intel desktop. They just need an iOS devices that sync's seamlessly with their phone/tablet/watch.
Why isn't Apple doing this?
I'd love to replace my MacMini with an iOS desktop.
The most expensive part of most Mac's are the intel chips. Replace those $300 chips with a $50 A-series chip.
Are you asking for Mac with A-series chips or a Mac with A-series chips + iOS operating system. Because there's no way in hell I want iOS running on my Mac.
I basically asking for an iOS desktop. No touch screen. Mouse/keyboard input.
It does not have to run Mac programs, just iOS stuff.
Why not just ask for a desktop dock for an iPad Pro? As long as you can connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse with a few USB ports and usb-c, that's all you really need. Then millions could have their iOS PC wish for a few hundred bucks.
The current iPad Pros produce equivalent or higher Geekbench scores than some of their desktop counter parts.
I thought of that too.
A doc would work in a household of one. But most desktops are a shared computer. It would be frustrated to find your 'desktop' computer gone when your wife took the iPad Pro to work. There is still a place for a standalone and non-portable computer.
And this is a budget level product. $299-$399. Nothing fancy. Basically just an extension of your iPhone.
Oh, one more feature. It would allow multiple user logins. So it would synch with different AppleID accounts depending on who you login as.
There's this thing called iCloud that lets users access documents independently of any one physical device. Everything your talking about might have made sense 5 or 10 years ago, but is completely off the table now. The days of the average household being tied to a desktop hub are numbered. In a few years people will look at desktop computers the way we look at a Norman Rockwell family sitting around the "wireless" listening to Abbot and Costello (or whatever they listened to with such rapture).
"While the 11-inch Air is Apple's cheapest laptop at $899, it achieves that price point with a relatively cramped display. For the same price, customers can buy a 12.9-inch iPad Pro equipped with an identical 128 gigabytes of storage".
<2 carriage returns here not included when using Safari en Mac>
The most "cramped" Mac is a million times better that the best iOS whatever. iOS is a limited jailed toy compared to any Mac.
Its nuts that Apple isn't addressing the $299-$399 desktop market. This was impossible before because Intel chips are so expensive. Now that the A-series chips are fast enough its time to make a move. Even a $299 iHome with 128GB flash and A10 would make a very nice profit for Apple.
I thought like you did till I was enlightened, curtesy of lowededwookie
The reason iOS got away with what they did was simply because it was a completely new way of doing things.
Originally there was no third party app support with ALL (emphasis not yelling :-) ) apps being web apps originally.
Apple ceded to developers allowing them to create their own apps and in the start there were some amazing apps.
There still are amazing apps but a lot of apps these days seem to be simplified apps that don't really showcase what
the OS is capable of. However, there was no legacy. All apps were developed from scratch and it wasn't really until around iOS 5 that we
started to see some truly amazing games coming for the platform. iOS works because the apps are not ports. They
don't come from other platforms. The apps on iOS generally serve a particular function for a mobile need. macOS however is different. The real problem with macOS is that it's a legacy way of coding. It's slowly changing
with the Mac App Store's limitations being inline with iOS' ideology but it's still a pretty open platform. Can macOS
apps run on ARM (ARM is actually the proper way of spelling it because it is an acronym for Advanced RISC
Machines)? Technically yes because the way macOS is designed to run it can be easily ported to other processor
architectures. I suspect in the future there will be a true amalgamation of the OSs into one but it's going to require a
complete developer rethink of how they will write applications and developers are not in that headspace and are mostly reluctant to change their ways. When it comes to games however this will NEVER happen. If you look at the types of games that are popular on iOS
they are not the same types of games that are popular on desktops/laptops. Will Eve Online ever be ported to ARM? I
seriously doubt it because there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices. It's not that the
processor isn't as powerful, it's simply that the missing Intel code prevents it from happening. You NEED the Intel
code for virtualisation to work otherwise you have to use emulation that ALWAYS has a performance hit. There are different types of emulation too. In the PPC processor days of the Mac the PPC processor had some Intel
code in it. This meant that there was a lot of emulation that didn't need to be emulated because they could just write
the bits for the Intel code natively and emulate the rest. There was massive performance hits but I remember running a
machine in Virtual PC that served as a PXE Boot server for building PCs running on an iBook with PPC processor
and Virtual PC and it was building machines only 7 minutes slower than a physical Compaq PC. It worked and it
worked well but it WAS very slow by comparison to running Parallels or VMWare today. This type of emulation could be likened to New Zealand Sign Language (sorry I'm from New Zealand so it's the way I
think). It's a completely different language but we can understand some of it because it uses natural expressions that
everyone seems to use. However, coding for a processor such as ARM that has no Intel code will mean you have to do COMPLETE
emulation. There is no ability to offload code to specific hardware designed to make things faster. As such you have
to translate every single piece of code to the ARM language. It's like being a Chinese translator. The words are
different, the sentence structure is different, the inflections are different, the use case of words can be different
depending on context and you've got to listen to what's being said, understand the context of what is being said,
then provide the English translation accordingly then do the English to Chinese translation for the reply. And that is why people will NOT port games and apps from Windows to ARM because the emulation will make the
app or game useless and porting the app to ARM, i.e. translating from Intel to ARM so the app is native code, is such
a difficult process due to the completely different way the processors do things, that the time and effort needed to do
this will be not worth the effort. This HAS happened in the past so I know this will be the case again. However, if a developer writes an app using nothing but the Apple developed APIs it is technically feasible to write
one application for different platforms but you HAVE to write interface code to match the platforms though. No point
in writing an app for mouse clicks for an OS that is designed for touchscreens. This then introduces UI rethinks and
brings you back to square one again. Microsoft failed with Windows 8 not because it was a bad idea but because they
forced a simplified interface on EVERY device be it phone or desktop. People rejected this idea because it didn't work
as well as it could have although I've used some Metro apps that work on desktops and phones and they work really well so it is possible but it requires a lot more thought. I'm not saying that your thinking is wrong. I like the idea. What I'm saying is developers won't go for it because the
cost to develop would eat into their profits and that's something they don't want which ultimately screws us as
consumers of their software.
"In the PPC processor days of the Mac the PPC processor had some Intel code in it. "
Whoa, whoa, what? That is absolutely not true. Actually, most of that is completely irrelevant or incorrect or just so confusing it shows the writer doesn't understand fully despite reading lots of different things.
"there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices"
Games for Mac and iOS use OpenGL (or newer ones will use Metal if you're lucky and Metal has the features they need). "All" that is required is a recompile of the game sources (typically C++) for ARM. macOS already supports fat binaries - historically for a selection from PowerPC 32-bit, PowerPC 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit - but now they're just using Intel 64-bit. Adding ARM 64-bit here isn't an issue, not after the initial port from Windows+DX to macOS+OGL/Metal.
VirtualPC was slow because it was emulating x86 instructions on a PowerPC processor - and that was in the days before JIT transpilation. Virtualisation is different, that's running multiple systems transparently on the same system. Nobody will run x86 games on ARM, they will run native games on ARM. Porting the app to ARM (once you've ported it from Windows to macOS) will likely be a configuration setting.
Note that x86 Android devices do include an ARM emulator for ARM apps, and it's very clever and it transpiles and everything so that it gets pretty good performance. It is likely that IF apple did an ARM macOS device, they would include an x86 emulator that did all that stuff but in the opposite direction.
Frankly Intel based devices are only needed by an extremely small portion of the population. I'd say less than 5%
I'd say way less. More than half the people on the planet live on less than $2.50 per day. They are simply hoping for a little food, water and maybe a roof. Perhaps you meant 5% of soccer moms in the US.
Its nuts that Apple isn't addressing the $299-$399 desktop market. This was impossible before because Intel chips are so expensive. Now that the A-series chips are fast enough its time to make a move. Even a $299 iHome with 128GB flash and A10 would make a very nice profit for Apple.
I get what you're saying, and Apple may make a desktop computer, based off of iOS / Apple SoC, but I doubt it will be this. If anything, it'll be a desktop that will allow for not only KB / mouse input but touch / Pencil as well. Very similar to this patent:
This is where I personally think the future of the laptop / desktop lies: devices that allow you to use KB / mouse / trackpad / touch / pencil. We're almost there with the iPad Pro.
On a side note, MS is rumored to be announcing a Surface AIO next week, and here is their patent for it. Very similiar in concept to Apple's iMac Touch patent:
What does the Intel CPU offer over a custom A-series CPU?
Errr..... all the software that is built for MacOS such as full blown Lightroom and Photoshop. Proper MS Office and everythnig else that runs on a general purpose OS/Computer that won't and never will run on IOS. Oh, and things like VMWare Fusion because some of us want to run other OS's.
If Apple close the door on Intel CPU's for the future then Microsoft will rub their hands with glee as all those who have escaped the debacle that is Windows 10 may well be forced back into the MS Borg.
IMO, they need to start building iOS laptops and desktops. Why this hasn't happenned blows my mind.
Because iOS is absolutely useless for serious productivity. Software is the bottleneck, not hardware.
Also, if they start supplying iOS laptops, their product offering is going to be super confusing and both OS'es start cannibalizing their products.
The moment Apple brings an iOS laptop is the moment I will (sadly) switch to Windows, because it would be a signal that they're killing of MacOS, which I think is far, far superior to iOS on desktop, for many reasons.
That's a lie. iOS is very productive.
95% of people just need a desktop to:
1. email 2. simple word processing 3. web 4. social media 5. shopping 6. online banking 7. watch and listen to media
iOS can easily do that at a very productive level.
Again stop thinking that most people need their desktop to run massive spreadsheets, write computer code, or render 10GB of graphics. They don't.
I agree that an iOS laptop isn't needed. But an iOS desktop is. Big time.
sorry Sog35, there is no way that I'm going to watch a movie on a 4in screen. Even the at seat screens in cattle class (coach to americans) is bigger that that. As for email and web, then no. I often include pictures from my extensive library (400,000+ digital images) in emails and web pages. How will I get access to that lot on IOS? Before you answer, iCloud bear in mind that these are professional level images. Most were taken with 24 or 36MPixel cameras and as a result use well over 8TB of NAS storage. Yes for some users then IOS on the desktop would work but for those of us who have made a positive decision to abandon Windows then being forced to go to IOS would be a disaster.
Today's tablets are not a full fledged computers. Apples (Macs) and Oranges (iPads). Don't get me wrong, I own a 64 GB iPad Air as well as a 2014 27" iMac and a 2012 13" MacBook Pro and each of them is useful to me in ways that the other two aren't. But my iPad Air, although useful as a quick, easy and easy to carry machine is dumbed down compared to my Macs. It may be all all the computing that many people need but I need and want more (please, I don't mean this as an insult to anyone). iOS 10, as much as it has advanced, is no where near as complete an OS as macOS Sierra is. Pages, Safari, Numbers, Firefox are not as feature rich on my iPad Air as they are on my Macs. iPads rely on small foot print SSD storage and SSD storage options are still in their adolescence but getting closer and closer to being affordable in more useful larger sizes.
My MBP is upgraded to 16 GB RAM and 2-512 GB SSDs and those upgrades have kept that machine downright speedy. My iMac has 24 GB RAM and a 3 TB Fusion Drive and it also is a speedy machine. I use Windows occasionally especially when I am helping my Windows based friends. I need, like and want more features in my OS and day to day software. I want to be able to tweak my machines. I like making Firefox do things Safari can't. I chuckle when I see a Microsoft Surface ad comparing their tablet with a keyboard hanging off of it to a Mac. Why don't they compare it to iPad Pro's?
I don't want a dumbed down Mac but I do want a more computer like tablet.
"In the PPC processor days of the Mac the PPC processor had some Intel code in it. "
Whoa, whoa, what? That is absolutely not true. Actually, most of that is completely irrelevant or incorrect or just so confusing it shows the writer doesn't understand fully despite reading lots of different things.
"there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices"
Games for Mac and iOS use OpenGL (or newer ones will use Metal if you're lucky and Metal has the features they need). "All" that is required is a recompile of the game sources (typically C++) for ARM. macOS already supports fat binaries - historically for a selection from PowerPC 32-bit, PowerPC 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit - but now they're just using Intel 64-bit. Adding ARM 64-bit here isn't an issue, not after the initial port from Windows+DX to macOS+OGL/Metal.
VirtualPC was slow because it was emulating x86 instructions on a PowerPC processor - and that was in the days before JIT transpilation. Virtualisation is different, that's running multiple systems transparently on the same system. Nobody will run x86 games on ARM, they will run native games on ARM. Porting the app to ARM (once you've ported it from Windows to macOS) will likely be a configuration setting.
Note that x86 Android devices do include an ARM emulator for ARM apps, and it's very clever and it transpiles and everything so that it gets pretty good performance. It is likely that IF apple did an ARM macOS device, they would include an x86 emulator that did all that stuff but in the opposite direction.
"In the PPC processor days of the Mac the PPC processor had some Intel code in it. "
Whoa, whoa, what? That is absolutely not true. Actually, most of that is completely irrelevant or incorrect or just so confusing it shows the writer doesn't understand fully despite reading lots of different things.
"there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices"
Games for Mac and iOS use OpenGL (or newer ones will use Metal if you're lucky and Metal has the features they need). "All" that is required is a recompile of the game sources (typically C++) for ARM. macOS already supports fat binaries - historically for a selection from PowerPC 32-bit, PowerPC 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit - but now they're just using Intel 64-bit. Adding ARM 64-bit here isn't an issue, not after the initial port from Windows+DX to macOS+OGL/Metal.
VirtualPC was slow because it was emulating x86 instructions on a PowerPC processor - and that was in the days before JIT transpilation. Virtualisation is different, that's running multiple systems transparently on the same system. Nobody will run x86 games on ARM, they will run native games on ARM. Porting the app to ARM (once you've ported it from Windows to macOS) will likely be a configuration setting.
Note that x86 Android devices do include an ARM emulator for ARM apps, and it's very clever and it transpiles and everything so that it gets pretty good performance. It is likely that IF apple did an ARM macOS device, they would include an x86 emulator that did all that stuff but in the opposite direction.
Again the point isn't technical, I think, it's a Matter of adoption from developers, when you run a Mac you have very different expectations to what it should be able to do to an iOS device, point is with out the intel code you'll need emulation and no matter how powerful a ARM chip is the will be lag and as far as I understand it delvelopers are too used to archiving functionality of a particular kind "speaking intel" in a way and having to translate or lean a new language to achieve the same thing on ARM would likely make it difficult to implement. Look I don't understand code much so I'm just pit ballin but what I understand is that intel owns the x86 code and using it will incur some costs for a very seemingly messy and likely unstable system for very little gain As I see it the world's too steeped in intel code to just abandon it in a ripped band aid solution, my thoughts are if it was that easy Apple would have done this all ready no ? Lately I've been thinking what if Apple and samsung and MS and all pc makers came together put up some cash buy Intel and free up some IP and allow every body to use Intel's stuff as a base for custom ARM chips and the transition would be seameless they wouldn't be trying to do computing over x86 code to spite intel's IP but include it for the benefit of all, an actual evolution, a proper successor that's built on the legacy of its predecessor, instead of trying to jump over the reality that once the hole world ran on intel chips and that intel code is still vital, why not jus free it up and just pay the price, all these guys have lots of money it shouldn't be impossible, thoughts ?
IMO, they need to start building iOS laptops and desktops. Why this hasn't happenned blows my mind.
The fact is 90% of the population does not need a power of an intel desktop. They just need an iOS devices that sync's seamlessly with their phone/tablet/watch.
Why isn't Apple doing this?
I'd love to replace my MacMini with an iOS desktop.
The most expensive part of most Mac's are the intel chips. Replace those $300 chips with a $50 A-series chip.
Are you asking for Mac with A-series chips or a Mac with A-series chips + iOS operating system. Because there's no way in hell I want iOS running on my Mac.
I basically asking for an iOS desktop. No touch screen. Mouse/keyboard input.
It does not have to run Mac programs, just iOS stuff.
Why not just ask for a desktop dock for an iPad Pro? As long as you can connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse with a few USB ports and usb-c, that's all you really need. Then millions could have their iOS PC wish for a few hundred bucks.
The current iPad Pros produce equivalent or higher Geekbench scores than some of their desktop counter parts.
I thought of that too.
A doc would work in a household of one. But most desktops are a shared computer. It would be frustrated to find your 'desktop' computer gone when your wife took the iPad Pro to work. There is still a place for a standalone and non-portable computer.
And this is a budget level product. $299-$399. Nothing fancy. Basically just an extension of your iPhone.
Oh, one more feature. It would allow multiple user logins. So it would synch with different AppleID accounts depending on who you login as.
There's this thing called iCloud that lets users access documents independently of any one physical device. Everything your talking about might have made sense 5 or 10 years ago, but is completely off the table now. The days of the average household being tied to a desktop hub are numbered. In a few years people will look at desktop computers the way we look at a Norman Rockwell family sitting around the "wireless" listening to Abbot and Costello (or whatever they listened to with such rapture).
explain why 300,000,000 PC's were sold last year?
The day of the desktop computer is FAR from over.
Look at the Amazon Echo. That's a desktop computer. Or the AppleTV. Same deal. Computers pulled into walls in a fixed location.
First, show me where the 300 million number comes from. I assume that's worldwide and that an increasing percentage of those sales are corporate. I have no doubt that the number of consumer desktop PCs sold in the US (and advanced industrial countries) is dropping. Tossing a revolutionary product into a decreasingly relevant market isn't the Apple way.
Then you try to argue that the Amazon Echo is a desktop computer? No mouse, no keyboard, no screen. I'm pretty sure that's the definition of a "post-PC" device. My iPhone sits on my desk sometimes; that doesn't make it a desktop computer. And if the AppleTV is a desktop computer, then Apple is already doing what you suggesting.
1. 14" Retina Macbook - with more ports 2. 14" Retina Macbook Pro - with more ports and OLED strip 3. 16" Retina Macbook Pro - with more ports, OLED strip and dedicated GPU.
"In the PPC processor days of the Mac the PPC processor had some Intel code in it. "
Whoa, whoa, what? That is absolutely not true. Actually, most of that is completely irrelevant or incorrect or just so confusing it shows the writer doesn't understand fully despite reading lots of different things.
"there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices"
Games for Mac and iOS use OpenGL (or newer ones will use Metal if you're lucky and Metal has the features they need). "All" that is required is a recompile of the game sources (typically C++) for ARM. macOS already supports fat binaries - historically for a selection from PowerPC 32-bit, PowerPC 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit - but now they're just using Intel 64-bit. Adding ARM 64-bit here isn't an issue, not after the initial port from Windows+DX to macOS+OGL/Metal.
VirtualPC was slow because it was emulating x86 instructions on a PowerPC processor - and that was in the days before JIT transpilation. Virtualisation is different, that's running multiple systems transparently on the same system. Nobody will run x86 games on ARM, they will run native games on ARM. Porting the app to ARM (once you've ported it from Windows to macOS) will likely be a configuration setting.
Note that x86 Android devices do include an ARM emulator for ARM apps, and it's very clever and it transpiles and everything so that it gets pretty good performance. It is likely that IF apple did an ARM macOS device, they would include an x86 emulator that did all that stuff but in the opposite direction.
Be all that as it may, his main point is spot on. Taking iOS and turning it into a desktop OS without a touch screen wouldn't make any sense at all. Apps designed for the iPhone and the iPad were/are amazing because they were designed for those devices. Whether they could theoretically run on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard is irrelevant; it would be a technical achievement (maybe) but a user experience disaster. Any good desktop app running on a theoretical (and never gonna happen) iOS Desktop would end up looking and working like it's current Mac/Windows counterpart.
IMO, they need to start building iOS laptops and desktops. Why this hasn't happenned blows my mind.
The fact is 90% of the population does not need a power of an intel desktop. They just need an iOS devices that sync's seamlessly with their phone/tablet/watch.
Why isn't Apple doing this?
I'd love to replace my MacMini with an iOS desktop.
The most expensive part of most Mac's are the intel chips. Replace those $300 chips with a $50 A-series chip.
Are you asking for Mac with A-series chips or a Mac with A-series chips + iOS operating system. Because there's no way in hell I want iOS running on my Mac.
I basically asking for an iOS desktop. No touch screen. Mouse/keyboard input.
It does not have to run Mac programs, just iOS stuff.
How, exactly, would iOS, which was explicitly designed for touch screen use, be used without a touch screen?
Same thing they did with AppleTV.
It ain't that hard. Just use cursor instead of finger.
Of course not all iOS apps would be available right away. But as long as they convert the top50 apps, about 90% will be satisfied. And most of the work is already done with Mac intergration with iOS.
Frankly Intel based devices are only needed by an extremly small portion of the population. I'd say less than 5%
Are you asking for developers to rework their apps' UI, essentially creating an entirely separate platform? It sounds to me like you are actually asking for a completely separate OS/platform. That's fine, if you honestly think there is sufficient market, with sufficient margin, to justify the creation and marketing of a hybrid platform; but I'm not persuaded that adequate market or margin are to be found for such a product line. As we all know, Apple does not focus on volume. Their focus is on margin, which is why, despite selling fewer smartphones than the Android market, their financial numbers are vastly superior to the aggregate of the Android market.
Comments
The current iPad Pros produce equivalent or higher Geekbench scores than some of their desktop counter parts.
90% (actually more than that) can do all those things on an iPad. The number of households that "need" a computer sitting on a desk is dwindling.
My money is on a larger MacBook added to the mix and a retirement of the MacBook Air name (for now at least). As others have said, the "Air" model was supposed to be Apple's thin and light entry. It makes no sense for MacBook to be the T&L model and MBA be the middle of the lineup.
I expect that Apple will dump MagSafe from the MacBook Pro, but I hope I'm wrong. It's one of those nice touches that makes a MacBook a MacBook.
In any case, just announce them already! At this point I expect Apple will forgo an "event" and that's ok with me. I doubt the nightly news would get a MacBook-only event more than a moment of coverage in any case; the average viewer doesn't care about a slightly better laptop.
I'm certain that macOS itself runs fine on Apple's Ax series of chips. The problem is the software, which is currently all AMD64.
However on a cheaper, consumer device it should be possible to quite worrying about all the software, and just get the popular software running on ARM first. This can be done in the Mac App Store by developers uploading a low level intermediate object code instead of final apps, and letting the App Store do the final device compilation. This is what happens for iOS applications for a couple of years already. An x86 emulator can be used for other software, even if it's not as fast.
I would really like an A10X based MacBook personally. Of course, that A10X would need to include some more laptop-oriented features - a couple of USB 3.1r2 controllers for a start for 10 Gbps USB C ports. Then it needs all the USB controllers for keyboard, trackpad, camera and other internal USB devices. A few PCIe lanes for WiFi, SSD too.
Note that these aren't a lot more than what was in A9X already, and the logic for these parts isn't large either. The question is whether Apple do this for A10X, or wait for A11X.
And a 3.5mm headphone jack.
sog35 - sticking two A10s in doesn't "just work". That's not an option, the SoC does not include coherent SMP support for multiple A10s (because why include that on a phone SoC!). Better to hope for more cores and gpu capability in a single A10X.
There's this thing called iCloud that lets users access documents independently of any one physical device. Everything your talking about might have made sense 5 or 10 years ago, but is completely off the table now. The days of the average household being tied to a desktop hub are numbered. In a few years people will look at desktop computers the way we look at a Norman Rockwell family sitting around the "wireless" listening to Abbot and Costello (or whatever they listened to with such rapture).
curtesy of lowededwookie
The reason iOS got away with what they did was simply because it was a completely new way of doing things. Originally there was no third party app support with ALL (emphasis not yelling :-) ) apps being web apps originally. Apple ceded to developers allowing them to create their own apps and in the start there were some amazing apps. There still are amazing apps but a lot of apps these days seem to be simplified apps that don't really showcase what the OS is capable of.
However, there was no legacy. All apps were developed from scratch and it wasn't really until around iOS 5 that we started to see some truly amazing games coming for the platform. iOS works because the apps are not ports. They don't come from other platforms.
The apps on iOS generally serve a particular function for a mobile need. macOS however is different. The real problem with macOS is that it's a legacy way of coding. It's slowly changing with the Mac App Store's limitations being inline with iOS' ideology but it's still a pretty open platform. Can macOS apps run on ARM (ARM is actually the proper way of spelling it because it is an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines)? Technically yes because the way macOS is designed to run it can be easily ported to other processor architectures. I suspect in the future there will be a true amalgamation of the OSs into one but it's going to require a complete developer rethink of how they will write applications and developers are not in that headspace and are mostly reluctant to change their ways.
When it comes to games however this will NEVER happen. If you look at the types of games that are popular on iOS they are not the same types of games that are popular on desktops/laptops. Will Eve Online ever be ported to ARM? I seriously doubt it because there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices. It's not that the processor isn't as powerful, it's simply that the missing Intel code prevents it from happening.
You NEED the Intel code for virtualisation to work otherwise you have to use emulation that ALWAYS has a performance hit. There are different types of emulation too. In the PPC processor days of the Mac the PPC processor had some Intel code in it. This meant that there was a lot of emulation that didn't need to be emulated because they could just write the bits for the Intel code natively and emulate the rest.
There was massive performance hits but I remember running a machine in Virtual PC that served as a PXE Boot server for building PCs running on an iBook with PPC processor and Virtual PC and it was building machines only 7 minutes slower than a physical Compaq PC. It worked and it worked well but it WAS very slow by comparison to running Parallels or VMWare today.
This type of emulation could be likened to New Zealand Sign Language (sorry I'm from New Zealand so it's the way I think). It's a completely different language but we can understand some of it because it uses natural expressions that everyone seems to use. However, coding for a processor such as ARM that has no Intel code will mean you have to do COMPLETE emulation.
There is no ability to offload code to specific hardware designed to make things faster. As such you have to translate every single piece of code to the ARM language. It's like being a Chinese translator. The words are different, the sentence structure is different, the inflections are different, the use case of words can be different depending on context and you've got to listen to what's being said, understand the context of what is being said, then provide the English translation accordingly then do the English to Chinese translation for the reply. And that is why people will NOT port games and apps from Windows to ARM because the emulation will make the app or game useless and porting the app to ARM, i.e. translating from Intel to ARM so the app is native code, is such a difficult process due to the completely different way the processors do things, that the time and effort needed to do this will be not worth the effort.
This HAS happened in the past so I know this will be the case again. However, if a developer writes an app using nothing but the Apple developed APIs it is technically feasible to write one application for different platforms but you HAVE to write interface code to match the platforms though. No point in writing an app for mouse clicks for an OS that is designed for touchscreens. This then introduces UI rethinks and brings you back to square one again. Microsoft failed with Windows 8 not because it was a bad idea but because they forced a simplified interface on EVERY device be it phone or desktop.
People rejected this idea because it didn't work as well as it could have although I've used some Metro apps that work on desktops and phones and they work really well so it is possible but it requires a lot more thought. I'm not saying that your thinking is wrong. I like the idea. What I'm saying is developers won't go for it because the cost to develop would eat into their profits and that's something they don't want which ultimately screws us as consumers of their software.
Whoa, whoa, what? That is absolutely not true. Actually, most of that is completely irrelevant or incorrect or just so confusing it shows the writer doesn't understand fully despite reading lots of different things.
"there is currently no way to get a DirectX game to work on iOS devices"
Games for Mac and iOS use OpenGL (or newer ones will use Metal if you're lucky and Metal has the features they need). "All" that is required is a recompile of the game sources (typically C++) for ARM. macOS already supports fat binaries - historically for a selection from PowerPC 32-bit, PowerPC 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit - but now they're just using Intel 64-bit. Adding ARM 64-bit here isn't an issue, not after the initial port from Windows+DX to macOS+OGL/Metal.
VirtualPC was slow because it was emulating x86 instructions on a PowerPC processor - and that was in the days before JIT transpilation. Virtualisation is different, that's running multiple systems transparently on the same system. Nobody will run x86 games on ARM, they will run native games on ARM. Porting the app to ARM (once you've ported it from Windows to macOS) will likely be a configuration setting.
Note that x86 Android devices do include an ARM emulator for ARM apps, and it's very clever and it transpiles and everything so that it gets pretty good performance. It is likely that IF apple did an ARM macOS device, they would include an x86 emulator that did all that stuff but in the opposite direction.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/08/the-mother-lode-welcome-to-the-imac-touch.html
This is where I personally think the future of the laptop / desktop lies: devices that allow you to use KB / mouse / trackpad / touch / pencil. We're almost there with the iPad Pro.
On a side note, MS is rumored to be announcing a Surface AIO next week, and here is their patent for it. Very similiar in concept to Apple's iMac Touch patent:
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2016/10/the-day-before-apple-launches-the-new-macbook-pro-microsoft-will-introduce-their-imac-challenger.html
Proper MS Office and everythnig else that runs on a general purpose OS/Computer that won't and never will run on IOS.
Oh, and things like VMWare Fusion because some of us want to run other OS's.
If Apple close the door on Intel CPU's for the future then Microsoft will rub their hands with glee as all those who have escaped the debacle that is Windows 10 may well be forced back into the MS Borg.
As for email and web, then no. I often include pictures from my extensive library (400,000+ digital images) in emails and web pages. How will I get access to that lot on IOS? Before you answer, iCloud bear in mind that these are professional level images. Most were taken with 24 or 36MPixel cameras and as a result use well over 8TB of NAS storage.
Yes for some users then IOS on the desktop would work but for those of us who have made a positive decision to abandon Windows then being forced to go to IOS would be a disaster.
My MBP is upgraded to 16 GB RAM and 2-512 GB SSDs and those upgrades have kept that machine downright speedy. My iMac has 24 GB RAM and a 3 TB Fusion Drive and it also is a speedy machine. I use Windows occasionally especially when I am helping my Windows based friends. I need, like and want more features in my OS and day to day software. I want to be able to tweak my machines. I like making Firefox do things Safari can't. I chuckle when I see a Microsoft Surface ad comparing their tablet with a keyboard hanging off of it to a Mac. Why don't they compare it to iPad Pro's?
I don't want a dumbed down Mac but I do want a more computer like tablet.
First, show me where the 300 million number comes from. I assume that's worldwide and that an increasing percentage of those sales are corporate. I have no doubt that the number of consumer desktop PCs sold in the US (and advanced industrial countries) is dropping. Tossing a revolutionary product into a decreasingly relevant market isn't the Apple way.
Then you try to argue that the Amazon Echo is a desktop computer? No mouse, no keyboard, no screen. I'm pretty sure that's the definition of a "post-PC" device. My iPhone sits on my desk sometimes; that doesn't make it a desktop computer. And if the AppleTV is a desktop computer, then Apple is already doing what you suggesting.
12" rMB
13" MBP
14" rMB
15" MBP
easier for the consumer to see through
Be all that as it may, his main point is spot on. Taking iOS and turning it into a desktop OS without a touch screen wouldn't make any sense at all. Apps designed for the iPhone and the iPad were/are amazing because they were designed for those devices. Whether they could theoretically run on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard is irrelevant; it would be a technical achievement (maybe) but a user experience disaster. Any good desktop app running on a theoretical (and never gonna happen) iOS Desktop would end up looking and working like it's current Mac/Windows counterpart.