Flytrap

danv2 said:

I have to be honest, I kind of want to vomit now. This only underscores them backtracking on years, and years, and years, of research and design. The touch screen is not the desktop and vice versa...  ...It did not work for Microsoft, and it did not work for Google, why in the hell is Apple doing this? ...But this is ripping up the playbook and crapping on the idea of a tablet OS and a desktop OS. They are separate....

I think that you need to reread the article... particularly this part:

With the expected upcoming changes, developers will be able to create a single application that can work with either a touchscreen, a mouse, or a trackpad.

I do not think that there is any backtracking of the original stance from the Jobsian days. It is just a common build with all the binaries for touch based wearable watch, mobile phone and tablet; pointer based devices like the AppleTV; mouse and trackpad based desktops and laptop portables; and soon (I hope) voice based digital assistants like the home pod.  These will always remain separate targets, but the developers toolchain will be significantly simplified.  Developers already separate the user interface, from the business logic from the data from the communication protocols between the different parts.... all that this adds is an additional interface view (pretty easy for apps that already support a light mobile interface with a heavy desktop browser view) - most of the code, which is sitting in the cloud, anyway, remains the same

Apple are the only one who can pull this off, because of the their control of all the target platforms - of course it does not work well when developers also want to target Windows, Chrome, Android etc. desktop, browser and mobile operating systems.

In my experience, the reason why developers have been slow to embrace the Mac AppStore has been because there are many toolchains that target multiple mobile operating systems, but few that target multiple desktop operating systems as effectively and economically as targeting the desktop browser has been. So I doubt that this strategy will change much... unless, Apple creates a compelling case for developers to build apps that interact directly with their desktop counterparts without the round trip via the cloud.

anome said:

Interesting that there's no FaceID... ...It might be that FaceID wasn't ready for the iMac Pro when they finalised the design...

FaceID not only requires a new camera module with the depth sensing technology (aka the notch), but it also requires processing logic commands (and machine learning capabilities) that are built into the A11 Bionic chip.

simply upgrading the iMac front facing camera array with the depth sensing camera module found in the iPhone X without also including the A11 Bionic SIC will not enable FaceID or the AI capabilities that it needs to function.