robbyx

DAalseth said:

robbyx said:

fastasleep said:

canukstorm said:

Apple hasn't been excited about the Mac in years - and it shows.  I'm sure we'll get a beautiful, fancy, and incredibly overpriced Mac Pro this year to keep the "pro" market happy for another few years.  In the meantime, Apple will continue to push the iPad as a laptop replacement, as well as a general purpose computing device.  They sure aren't pushing the Mac!  What we're going to see with Marzipan is not unlike what we saw with Classic > Carbon > Cocoa.  

I don’t know why people take statements like this seriously. They’ve been filling all the gaps in the Mac lineup, and aside from a stumble where we had multiple pauses in updates overlapping, have more than proven to me that they actively care about the Mac. I haven’t seen them “pushing” the Mac any less than any other time in the past decade.

Also sounds like they don’t really understand what Marzipan is. They’re literally just bridging gaps between iOS and macOS to make it easier to target both platforms when building apps. The idea that making it easier for iOS developers to start targeting the Mac as well somehow signals the death of the Mac is absurd for obvious reasons. 

It's not absurd at all.  I would suggest that you're simply not looking far enough into the future.  Making it easier for iOS developers to target the Mac standardizes development between the two platforms.  The initial and short-term result will be iOS apps coming to the Mac.  The long-term result will be Mac and iOS apps using all of the same APIs.  Once that happens, the underlying guts of the OS become less important.  And while iOS is based on macOS, they are still quite different in many key respects, not the least of which is user access to the Unix layer of macOS.

I think it's very obvious from the way Apple has treated the Mac over the past decade that its heart now belongs to iOS.  The Mac Pro has been a joke product for years now.  The trashcan Mac Pro wasn't a proper "pro" device, unless you like a rat's nest of wires and stacks of external boxes.  Mac prices keep rising, yet the hardware is never cutting-edge.  Sometimes it's several years out of date, yet still commands top dollar.  Furthermore, Apple is doing more and more to lock the Mac down (T2 chip) as well as limit it's overall usefulness as a Unix platform.  They have gutted Server.  Each macOS revision sees macOS lose a bit more of its Unix-ness, even if it's not always obvious to the end user.

As for Apple not pushing the Mac, they don't.  They've accepted their marketshare glass ceiling and aren't doing anything to break through.  They haven't for years.  In fact, they do the opposite.  They raise prices and further alienate many types of users.  The new Mini is a perfect example.  In my opinion they are really starting to push more of their user base to iOS and the iPad as a general purpose computing tool.  They're happy to milk the Mac, just as they milked the Apple II back in the day, but the focus is now on iOS, just as it was on the Mac back in the twilight days of the Apple II.  I find it hard to believe that they will dedicate the resources to porting macOS (as we know it today) to ARM.  They could and probably already have, but I don't think they'll bring it to market until most apps use Marzipan.

In the end, whether we call it macOS or iOS probably doesn't matter.  Long-term they will be one unified OS.  Marzipan starts that process.  When iOS moves to the desktop, I don't think most users will notice and I think that's very much Apple's goal.  What I see being lost, ultimately, from macOS is all of the Unix stuff.  Just like one doesn't have access to this part of iOS, I believe macOS will ultimately follow.

I can't disagree. The comparison to when they were selling the Mac and AppleII series is very apt. They did sell the AppleII up until the early '90s but you could tell the Mac was where they were going. I hadn't thought of it before you mentioned it but it does have the same feel. iOS devices are growing by leaps and bounds. Just as when the Mac became a more powerful and versatile system than the AppleII, the iPad is rapidly approaching the same point, where you will be able to do everything you can on a Mac and more, on iOS. Once that happens a lot of people will jump ship. 

canukstorm said:

rogifan_new said:

I still believe it's BS and so does my Twitter feed of Apple bloggers and pundits. Services are there to augment devices not replace them as the main revenue driver. If you think the future of Apple in terms of revenue growth is IAP games then Apple is in deep trouble. And let's face it there's nothing exciting about saying revenue grew because people handed down their iPhone or iPad and those people are now buying apps. It will be really depressing if Apple implements some paid placement for search just to offset declining hardware sales.

There's nothing wrong with growing revenue by monetizing your user base. I'm all for it.  Only bump in the road that I see is that Eddy Cue seems to break everything he touches.

SpamSandwich said:

Will still be a number of years before we see the fruits of this engineering and prototyping work, if ever. I'm interested that they're working on this and would be thrilled if I could actually afford the end product.