The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved inside an ecosystem that's optimized for passive media consumption and online shopping though.
My wife is currently using Affinity and Adobe products to work on illustrations. It works mostly the same for her as on her Mac. She does not care about small, specialised tools, she wants one app that does everything she needs. The iPad is doing a great job running those apps.
I am not sure how many users (outside of the ones who got used to it) want UNIX-like flexibility vs "give me an app that does everything I need". If the later group keeps getting larger the walled garden approach to apps might actually work.
It's not just UNIX-like flexibility, it's human uniqueness, and the uniqueness of the tasks they perform and the ideas they have. It's also the difference between owning and knowing how to use a tool, versus renting someone to do it for you who might help you today, but could rob or hurt you tomorrow.
Just consider how we spend decades to teach new humans to read and write as well as they can learn it, versus just giving them a bunch of emoticons to signal when they're hungry or sleepy or bored. Because we expect them to become full peers, and architects of their world, responsible for the next generation, not just consumers picking options others prepared for them. And we don't care if they want that, because we know what they don't know, yet. We base our judgement on the information we have, not the information they lack.
Making an exception for computer literacy just because it is hard (as if language and reading and writing aren't until you get used to them) set us on a terrible path.
I think this is crux of the matter. Even outside the Apple ecosystem I see a tendency in people to not think about composing multiple tools but to look for an app that does everything.
I'm talking about my colleagues, working in IT, but in a Windows environment.
And on Windows there's PowerShell, which, although slow and to me not as flexible as bash, still allows one to do quite a lot of things. But people seem to see using it as a last resort, when there's absolutely no way of doing what they want by clicking around some window.
But no desktop operating systems are well suited to being used primarily by professionals, not even Linux. The desktop paradigm is fine, but it was designed with the idea of making computers more accessible, and it inhibits composing different pieces of software together, which is what a professional-first operating system should optimize for.
I'm not sure how viable a good professional OS is. It would arguably require graphical software vendors through the biggest design paradigm shift in their history, to serve a relatively small market. The transition to the desktop paradigm wasn't as demanding — you just switched from taking control of the graphics hardware and controlling the entire screen to doing basically the same thing, just with the OS as a proxy so that you're rendering to a smaller rectangle. Composable graphical interfaces means abandoning the idea of having complete control over your rectangles.
I love macOS and I’m a professional. I mean, I get paid for what I do. I’m a professional, right?
Thought it will still be interesting to see where that will go in the next 20 years. Like you said with the convergence of desktop and mobile devices on the one hand I can't see traditional OS's surviving but on the other hand I don't se another option given that's the only medium to build the higher level software.
The Xerox Parc and Smalltalk are the ancestors of today’s WIMP UI. If you look at Squeak (or Pharo) you’ll see how is possible to make a desktop UI that’s more composable than the usual Unix shell. The problem is not the desktop paradigm, but a lack of commercial interest.
Funny, the possibility to do that currently exists in a walled garden, for audio apps: https://audiob.us . This is used by creators and live performers, exclusively. I don't think anyone uses applications in this ecosystem for "consumption" purposes.
The problem was never was the current OSs, it was just about app makers not willing or not knowing how to collaborate amongst themselves. It was also never about open vs closed, since AudioBus is proprietary and 99% of the apps that support it are also proprietary.
The thing about UNIX pipes is that they use plain text. AudioBus uses audio. Those are two things that naturally impose limitations. Developers seem ok with those "natural limitations" but whenever you want to impose limitations to something else you immediately get pushback.
You wouldn't be able to do that in a business CRUD app for example. The amount of wheel-reinvention is too big on those, compared to audio/video/unix-tools.
I haven't been able to play with the shortcuts functionality because I don't have an iPhone, but if it is what I think it is it, it is a powerful tool to do things with.
We shouldn't fail to acknowledge that most, if not all, spend more time consuming than creating.
Then you have the group that isn't served with something as powerful as a real computer. My grandparents would be much better served with an iPad instead of a computer, since all they need is a browser and a system to do video calls.
Now, Smalltalk provides the infrastructure for composability, but Smalltalk by itself doesn't provide us the full-fledged desktop environment and applications that users have come to expect; they would have to be implemented in Smalltalk. But where things get interesting in a Smalltalk-implemented desktop environment is that the live object environment is still there, leading to interesting possibilities. Imagine being able to control a word processing program through scripts written outside the word processor, without the word processing program itself having to implement something like Visual Basic for Applications? Imagine being able to control a spreadsheet with Smalltalk methods on cells instead of having to learn the spreadsheet's language or having to learn Visual Basic for Applications? The possibilities become even more intriguing when objects can interact with each other in ways that are far more general than Unix pipes. This is the desktop environment I dream of using, the unification of the ease of use of GUIs and the flexibility and programmability similar to the Unix shell.
Oddly enough, in the mid-1990's Apple implemented a less-ambitious (but still very ambitious for its time) version of this vision known as OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc). There are some wonderful videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E (a three minute summary) and at https://youtu.be/2FSFvEIpm5o (a 50-minute demo). OpenDoc was released in 1996, if I recall correctly, and there were some applications written with OpenDoc, most notably the CyberDog web browser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog). However, once Apple bought NeXT in late 1996, Apple committed itself to building its next-generation operating system on NeXT, which had its own collection of object-oriented APIs. The cancellation of OpenDoc led to this famous spat during WWDC 1997 when a disgruntled developer questioned Steve Jobs on Apple's decision to cancel OpenDoc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o).
Why was OpenDoc cancelled? One can argue that OpenDoc's cancellation was due to Apple needing to have a tight focus during its very vulnerable period in 1997. The proof is in the pudding: mid-1990's Apple before the return of Steve Jobs was an unfocused beacon that was able to produce many interesting technological demos (the Dylan programming language, SK8, OpenDoc), but there was no single coherent vision. The Taligent and Copland projects, which strove to replace the classic Mac OS with then-modern underpinnings, were disasters. OpenDoc was just one out of the many, sometimes competing, visions that Apple had during this time. Steve Jobs was able to turn around Apple's fortunes by having Apple focus on one vision for the Mac.
However, another way of looking at the cancellation of OpenDoc is that its success would have completely upended the software industry. Instead of software vendors selling apps, software vendors would sell components, which users can integrate to create custom workflows. While I believe that this would have led to a lot of flexibility and user-empowerment, OpenDoc would have also been seriously challenged by major software vendors like Microsoft and Adobe, whose empires were built on selling large, proprietary software packages. They were not going to give up their moats without a fight.
Still, I dream of the modern realization of component-based software, and it's something I've been thinking a lot about for the past few years.
Ironically, that was the main interest of Brad Cox who, with Tom Love, created Objective-C, which was acquired by NeXT, and became the way forward for Apple.
In my experience, it is very hard to build a business around software objects. I spent a couple years trying to build an App around the Apple Watch. But, Apple only allows 3rd party complications. It is essentially a component. Apple recommends focusing on doing only one thing.
Moreover, as a component, you the developer often have less control over the UX. On the Apple Watch, when a user opens -say- Spotify on the iPhone, your app is kicked out.
So, a couple weeks ago, I decided to put the Apple Watch development on hold and do something else on the iPad.
http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-future-of-software...
And that culminated in
Essentially all code is pure functional and content addressable, meaning it’s inherently distributable and transferable (including closures). Like Smalltalk but with more use of modern programming language theory.
I have good news, iOS user's productivity woes are solved. Using iSH you can pipe text between command line tools all day every day. Finally the power of the iPad is unleashed!
I would like seamless interoperability between CLI and GUI apps, a unified file system, the ability to run virtual machines, containers[1] or maybe just nginx[2].
And then you have the usability issues of the iPad(OS) like external displays being mirrored only, or only recently being able to actually access files from a USB drive...
The iPad is a great media consumption device, that has some limited professional use (art, video editing maybe), but let's not fool ourselves that it's anywhere near being a replacement for a fully functional computer.
In the "mobile app ecosystem", each application is more or less an island. It would be possible to achieve something similar on iOS/Android devices, but the entire "value proposition" of walled garden ecosystems isn't compatibel with this idea of open and creative computing. One prerequisite is that I actually own my device and can do anything I want with it, without the platform owner getting in the way.
Here’s one question: hover on focus vs click to focus?
Hover makes sense if you think of the pointer as a finger.
Who are you talking about? Senior citizens? Or maybe people outside of the US in developing countries? Because anyone under 50 in the US has grown up around tech.
It's somewhat analogous to using Automator and/or macOS' Open Scripting Architecture.
Very true.
> It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved inside an ecosystem that's optimized for passive media consumption and online shopping though.
Unix-like flexibility is also extremely insecure and easy to screw up.
It’s fairly obvious that the App Store ecosystem can and is becoming increasingly flexible. Things like shortcuts and safari extensions are obvious examples.
Unix-like flexibility will likely never come to iOS, nor should it, but it’s easy to imagine a steady drumbeat of easy to use managed points of flexibility that ultimately provide 80% of what people use Unix-flexibility for but without the insecurity or brittleness.
It’s not so easy to imagine how ease of use, security and robustness can be retrofitted to unix any other way.
Remember iOS is Unix. It’s just a matter of what they build for end users.
There’s little reason that Apple couldn’t do the same thing with iPads, where the “desktop UI” is macOS. Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around for you to plug your device into a monitor.
Apple are already training us for this with the new version of Continuity — there’s little difference between “control your Mac from your iPad” and “control the macOS DE container running on your iPad, from your iPad.”
The only real differences in interaction paradigm between Continuity and a DEX-like approach, now that I think of it, would be:
- a shared filesystem
- [possibly] moving iPad/Catalyst apps freely between screens, where they swap between being fullscreen on iPadOS and being windows on macOS
This would also be a (rather-charitable) explanation for why iPadOS has never done anything smart so far when plugged into an HDMI display. If they were planning to do this, they wouldn’t bother with half-steps like giving iPadOS apps multi-display support.
I want to own a single "pocket computer" and that's it, no more syncing, just a single device. I can drop it into a dock on my desk, that breaks out the I/O into a 30" display, keyboard, trackpad, speakers, and it activates the Mac desktop environment.
Unplug from the dock, it pauses everything I'm doing on the desktop, and it goes back into my pocket and uses the touch screen.
I want basically what you’re describing, but rather than having 2 distinct desktop environments I posit that the iPadOS environment, with a few refinements, would be better for desktop usage than macOS’ DE. Specifically, the refinements I’d want would include allowing more than 2 apps in a split view, and perhaps some reconsideration of that floating app-stack thing to make it less clunky. As a daily user of tiling window managers on a Linux desktop, floating desktop windows seem like a UI dead end that we’ve somehow been trapped in for decades. Growing existing “smartphone/tablet” UI to offer more power seems like a more realistic way to widespread adoption of a better desktop paradigm than removing “features” that most current desktop users have become familiar with.
iPadOS 15 has limited support for floating windows and more than three "windows" on screen at once. I'd posit that they are preparing the APIs for floating window support for external displays in a future version of iPadOS.
>As a daily user of tiling window managers on a Linux desktop, floating desktop windows seem like a UI dead end that we’ve somehow been trapped in for decades
As a Mac user, I agree. On my 13-inch notebook, I more or less always use applications in a full screen configuration. The notebook screen is too small to allow for effective uses of floating windows.
However, even on a 27-inch display, I still find myself using full screen applications more often than not.
In fact I'd be ecstatic if a future version of macOS stole some of the multitasking features from iPadOS. Managing fullscreen apps on the Mac is a lot clunkier than it is on the iPad.
Apple has bad habit to install absolutely minimum amounts of RAM into their mobile devices. iPhone had 2 GB RAM when Androids (with similar price) had 8 GB RAM. It means that RAM will be main issue for supporting those devices in the future iOS versions and eventually they'll be dropped, despite extremely powerful CPU and huge storage.
But with 16 GB it won't be the case ever. And, of course, CPU will not significantly progress in the future and certainly will not the limiting factor. So this tablet should easily last for another 10 years (if battery could be replaced with reasonable efforts).
This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity.
My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).
Maybe for how we do IT. But consider the future where 99% of apps are developed on a tablet or phone (for a tablet or phone) using a cloud web interface with mostly low-code or no-code widget drag and drops.
This will simply never happen. Just given the history of low-code / no-code, they are great for prototypes and small apps but as soon as you do anything more then that's when things start falling off a cliff. Of all the apps I've been contracted to build or help build I can think of maybe one that we could have glued together using low-code. Everything else just has too much custom logic behind the scenes.
It is a funny feeling working on the same Playground project on both an iPad and MacBook, but it works. The code for reading data files is a bit different, but the iPad dev experience will get better.
Their competitors and the pundit-sphere saw this as a fatal weakness, but every attempt at unifying touch and keyboard/mouse interfaces failed miserably.
So I'm not concerned about Apple trying to merge iPadOS and MacOS, because they already know it would be a mistake and are sticking to their guns until maybe our eyes and fingers get about 4x as sharp.
Only because it wasn't really tried. Heck, GNOME on a touchscreen or tablet PC has a better "unified" touch+mouse interface than any of its competitors on the desktop and mobile side.
It feels like a toy. Very disappointing.
I don’t understand the point of iPad Pros being so powerful when they can’t - y’know - run even Apple’s own Pro software. (Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro)
They’re mind-numbingly expensive toys, for sure.
ProCreate, various image editing tools, even video editing... I know a lot of talented professionals who've switched over to iPad Pros for most of their work except 3D.
A large part of that is the Apple Pencil and very low latency, but they appreciate every spec bump because it does help their type of work out.
Still, it is nice for consuming books, blogs and video.
As far as I know, Apple never said “you’ll be able to run your favorite macOS apps on it because the hardware is more than capable.”
That's pretty much been the trend for years now.
More to the point, this seems to be a general trend: we have so much better technology by now, but a worse society. That is something I don't know how to get out of.
I know some people who used to work at Apple and they said it was clear that Apple wanted to let the Mac die and focus primarily on iPadOS and iOS but regular users and professionals kept buying Macs so they were forced to revert their attention to it again.
Human comes to work => docks/AirPlays their system to external monitor => does work in browsers/office apps. We are pretty close to this reality tbh. Mostly software is a limiting factor.
As for computer pros...we probably will be forced to use some other vendors(sad) or use remote systems for compute tasks while using our phone/tablet as thin client.
Thanks Apple for not jumping into that train just yet!
The last time I visited my Dad, I tried plugging my iPad Pro into his new Apple 6K monitor - really nice! Some apps like Mosh use two displays fairly well.
Even with limited multiple windows, it was nice. Then playing Apple Arcade games on the 6K monitor was visually stunning and fun.
If I had only one device that could function as you and I want it to, it would be an iPhone or new iPad Pro that also functioned as a cell phone. I use the smaller iPad Pro, and it really is portable. Probably an all in one iPhone would be best.
This sounds like Samsung DeX?
The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be shifted to be the ones living in the emulation layer like Classic OS9 apps to eventually be removed completely.
If you think I’m wrong, forget your own opinions and prejudices to iPad and walled garden computing and imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.
You are correct, one of those is not like the others, but it isn’t the Macs. According to their latest earnings report, iPhones made Apple $39.57B, iPads $7.37B, and Macs $8.24B [0]. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPadOS and MacOS merged in the near future, especially since they are running on the same chips, but it won’t be because iPads are the ones making all the money.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/27/apple-aapl-earnings-q3-2021....
These are just device sales right? You have to remember iPads have the App Store revenue and the cream scooping of IAP/subscription revenue of most applications running on them.
Apple doesn't get a cut of my Photoshop subscription on Mac, it absolutely gets a cut when I buy Procreate on iOS.
After all, Apple has to use something to develop iOS, and I think it's unlikely they'd create a special in-house operating system for the exclusive use of their OS development teams that's totally different than what they ship to consumers.
Apple doesn’t need to rush this process, but it is inevitable IMO, and is foreshadowed by actions like allowing iOS apps to run on macOS, moving Mac OS closer in UI to mobile, adding essentials like file handling to the mobile os.
At this point the underlying OS is the same, the UIs are converging, the UI frameworks for iOS are almost capable of replacing Mac OS, and it would be relatively easy to merge them in the next few years, keeping some extra layers of UI for macs but merging most of it and certainly the dev frameworks. We may see touchscreen macs or dockable iOS devices first though.
I would love a dockable iPhone, I’d pay a big premium for an M line iPhone that has the full MacOS in dock mode.
I'd argue that they're just doing the obvious: refining and maturing iPadOS, and unifying the vibe of all their products. This makes sense. Just as one band influencing another doesn't mean that the two bands will eventually converge into an amorphous blob, two products by the same company influencing one another doesn't mean that the two will become a single product.
I'd just take Apple's word for it that they've maintained all along: they're letting the device do its thing as best it can. If iOS were swallowing everything, then why did iPadOS split out into its own thing? People don't give enough credence to the fact that these platforms are splitting just as much as they're merging.
Also, even if all devices were going the way of "dumbed-down iOS," someone still needs to develop for it, and you best believe that Apple won't loosen their grip on that segment. Just as Mac Pros are loss leaders just to keep the creative class, macOS devices in general will stick around, hell or high water, just to retain the developer class.
I for one welcome the iPadOS-ification of macOS, the macOS-ification of iPadOS, and so on. They're just allowing the products to slowly evolve and (ideally) be the best version of what their interface dictates, just as they've always done and always said they're doing.
I do think at some point they'll merge them though - maintaining two APIs which are distinct but incredibly similar is a waste of effort and confusing for developers.
Above and beyond that fairly self-evident conclusion, there is plenty of room for more sophisticated interaction with iOS devices that maintain the basic interface but also provide extremely sophisticated data manipulation capabilities. Perhaps even more powerfully than our beloved UNIX shells - think something like AI assisted voice interaction where you can easily state a pipeline verbally: "take results from A that contain N and modify them by X and then sort them by I and make a graph and paste it to my document". (e.g., grep | sed | sort | gnuplot | paste >> example.doc)
That sort of thing is potentially just a few iterations away and simultaneously more powerful and more useful than text mode pipes, if only for the fact that the user wouldn't be required to memorize thousands of cryptic flags/switches. The same interface could be used to string these directives together to form scripts and set jobs, etc.
This isn't meant to be a specific prediction, by the way, just one glimpse into the idea space. There are so many good ideas that people haven't had yet... it just staggers the mind to consider the potential. I'm just skimming the surface but surely there are so many ways to marry the insanely intuitive discoverability of something like iOS with the equally awesome power of the UNIX philosophy.
But it's up to us to find them, rather than get inflexible and grumbly and say it can't be done, or Apple is stupid, or whatever nonsense take you might jerk your knee towards ;)
The pipeline you described reminds me of Apple Shortcuts - it’s easy and useful. Most recently I made a GIF out of a bunch of photos on my phone, which is a simple task that used to require a far from ideal app (ads, black-box that could be hiding analytics and tracking tasks).
I've had an iPad since day one, generation one and took notes with an aftermarket stylus. I used Keynote and OmniGraffle to make slideshows and diagrams.
I even bought an Apogee JAM and was able to record my electric guitar in GarageBand and used several other apps for guitar effects and simulated amplification. My favorite was AmpKit+ [http://agilepartners.com/apps/ampkit/].
The iPad is a great creator's device and has only improved with the Apple Pencil and other enhancements.
That being said, if Apple keeps moving macOS towards iPadOS I'm out. The iPad is a complementary device as I use it. It can not replace a notebook computer and my notebook computer can not replace my desktop.
There are definitely people that can get by with just an iPad or even just a smartphone, but I can't and will not. There are still many options for non-Apple notebooks and workstations and many more OS options too.
I'm finding it harder and harder to justify that the divergence even needed to happen at all when more and more iPad users are just interacting with it via keyboard case and trackpad.
This is a similar transition to MS-DOS on Windows 95 (successful), Unix terminal on Mac OS X (successful) or Windows 8 desktop program in Windows 8 tablet Metro shell (unsuccessful).
Most people just need MacOSX for 10% of their computing needs — that 10% is unique for most people though — and an iPad Pro able to access macOS when needed would be enough for peace of mind.
On the flip side if Apple just added cellular and Apple Pencil support to the Mac (not even a touchscreen/pen supported screen; just Apple Pencil support for the trackpad) it would decimate sales of iPad Pro.
Maybe the normal OSes that we all grew up with are actually overkill for these other users and they dont even want it. Why would they need a shell? Or the ability to install some arbitrary programs? They only need email and word and thats it.
Maybe this is not a bad thing in the end? Who knows.
If Apple managed to offer a revolutionary input for the iPad (perhaps subvocalised speech input or a a redesigned touch/pen input) it would be the first step to a touch-centric interface as capable as keyboard+mouse
Now that their hardware is all lined up between laptops and mobile devices, I fully expect the merge to happen in a few years. I feel Apple's software has been stagnant for too long and I won't be buying new hardware until then.
Odd. I'm still happy to use Mac OS High Sierra ... Yosemite even. I wonder with each OS release why I would even want the upgrade.
Mainly because apps I use (Affinity, etc.) stop working (or stop trying to work) for older versions of Mac OS.
There are tools available to schools that allow multiple logins on a single iPad. It would be nice if they had something similar for families.
iOS works fine for a phone. It’s worthless for my job or my personal interests.
I have a 2018 iPad and it's easily my favorite computer to use. With a keyboard, it's lovely to write on. With the Pencil and Good Notes it's a fantastic note taking device. Get ProCreate and it's an amazing combination for sketching and drawing. By itself, it's a great device for reference manuals and videos when I'm doing something like fixing my washing machine.
I don't read much on it because I have a dedicated e-reader. I don't play games on it because I have a console that's better for gaming. I don't write software on it because I have a workstation and laptop configured exactly for that purpose.
I think as they make changes to broaden the iPad's appeal, they may be undermining it.
The only possible way for iPad to become slightly useful is to provide a proper macOS in a some way. But it's still useless because of terrible thermals and will throttle on any serious load. Even laptops are barely able to keep up with ever increasing demands from developers. Tablet is just not made for work. It's good to read a book, that I'll admit. Even browser is barely usable, there's no developer console to kill that annoying div.
It's certainly not impossible but one could argue that some oddities could be cleaned up. Releasing software as dmg on Mac is really terrible for new users (and I hate that I did it for Aerial's companion app), it's inherited from the olden days of CD-ROMs and the fact that you have to unmount it is really something that could be improved on.
Now, one could argue Apple has very low incentive to provide something better and push for a new norm (most software nowadays does zip and detect if user launches from the Downloads folder, complaining/moving the file in Applications for you), but that's definitely a relic of the past that, while you can still support it for legacy reasons, should be phased out for something better officially pushed by Apple (that is not just the App Store).
The Apple approach to feature changes/simplifications on macOS though seems solely based on design. Hiding the document proxy icons on windows in Big Sur is a good example of this [1].
If you've seen Monterey betas, Safari tabs are also losing functionalities (favicons worked a bit like document proxy icons, that's gone now) and while they rolled back some of the most egregious changes (they had made a utter mess with toolbar buttons in beta 1), the new UI is still clunky in terms of general usability and readability.
I guess it looks epurated and consistent with the new Safari iPad UI, but do those change help in any way the new users to get around the inherited "peculiarities" of the Mac ? I don't think so.
And when Apple does "line up" features to make them consistent accross platforms, it's always the Mac that loses. The phasing out of plugins in Safari for app extensions killed uBlock Origin for example, and the alternatives are certainly not as great.
[1] : https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_maco...
Unifying an OS and it's GUI/UX layer across devices with fundamental differences like this gives you lowest denominator crap.
We've seen many tries at unifying the design language between mobile and computer. ChromeOS, Windows 10, Android Desktop Mode, Ubuntu's Unity all are mobile/desktop UIs. What makes them work (to the extent they do work) is that most devices have touch screens (well, not so much with Android in desktop mode). Without the touch screen, optimizing the shape of UI components for touch is actually a bad experience as a pointing device works very differently than does a touch screen.
But the very basic problem is file handling. It somehow seems to vary across apps. Some have local storage to themselves which is hidden from everyone, some have visible local storage, others support files/iCloud. While files can be cumbersome on its own, if at least all apps would share the data in a way accessible by files, it would be a start.
Best example which keeps bugging me: music. I ripped my CDs into my iTunes library and consequently into Apple Music. Now, Apple Music decided to delete some of my tracks from its library. How to get them back? I even was able to put them into my iCloud drive, but there is no way to add music to your iPad this way. Is there any other way you can add tracks to Apple Music? Is there any way to cause iTunes, which still has all of them, to upload them to Apple Music again (never mention that I do need my Mac for that, destroying the notion of the iPad being stand-alone).
Same situation with videos. How to copy videos from iCloud onto the iPad apps? And of course, none of these apps open something like an "open file" mechanism.
I quite like my iPad Pro. But I never figured out, how to really "do" things with it. The only positive exception seems to be the "Working Copy" git client, which enables some apps to be used productively.
Same question with Android phones and Chrome OS.
What's the technical challenge?
I feel the only reason Apple won't do it is because then instead of buying 2 to 3 devices, people would buy just one, which will hurt their revenue. (Doesn't explain why Google won't)
All the development goes to the cloud nowadays. The local machine will soon become irrelevant.
I have never needed to access the shell on my iPhone. But to do dev work I obviously need it on my Mac. But if you look at the rise of Docker and other such things, running stuff on the core OS is not always very optimal. It would be just as good to have a virtualized machine in whatever OS I want and be able to take that around with me. When I can have that, I don’t really care how locked down they make the OS as long as I can stay productive.
I do think it would be great to unify though, maybe find a way to keep everyone happy. It would be great to just have an iPad (or any tablet device) and be able to just use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and be able to run any IDE, game, or app you want.
As computers get more powerful, it might not even be necessary to have a full-blown desktop PC for regular personal use.
My understanding is that the kernel is basically the same already, it is the services stacked on top that are different.
For a fact, Steve Jobs mentioned that in his iPhone introduction keynote in 2007
In fact if you care about performance and reliability (particularly add more cores and get more performance) there is no option rather than build on a mature kernel. Google's Fuchsia, for instance, is a high risk project which might never reach parity with Android.
(I think of Microsoft's "dual track" OS strategy that took 5 years to merge Windows 95 and Windows NT)
Having XCode on an iPad would be convenient as well - though it's not the only IDE I use and would still ultimately prefer a proper laptop/desktop form-factor for "serious" programming.
iPad Pro M1 is the baby first step to start bringing in more MacOS compatible pieces to iPadOS. Eventually it would suck some or even most of the MacOS users into the iPadOS.
https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html
While I won't repeat myself too much, my basic point is that Apple sees iOS (and iPadOS) devices as application consoles and Macs as general purpose computers, and there is no good business case for changing that any time soon. The Venn diagram of "users likely to walk over such a drastic change to the Mac" and "users likely to spend boggling amounts of money on Apple hardware" is close to a perfect circle, and the accounting department would probably not be super keen on taking the bet that the increased service revenue from shoving all app sales through the App Store would make up for the last hardware sales. You need 15–30% of a hell of a lot of apps to make up for a single lost 16-inch MacBook Pro sale, let alone a Mac Pro.
Furthermore: given all the radical changes Apple made to the Mac in 2020, that still feels like the "now or never" moment. I wrote back in April that "if M1 Macs and macOS Big Sur didn't lock us into an App Store-only world, it's pretty unlikely macOS Pismo Beach or whatever is going to." Well, it's a year later, and macOS Monterey still isn't. Maybe in a year or two macOS Fresno will come along and prove me wrong, but I'm pretty confident it won't.
The flip side of this is that I don't think iPadOS is going to be opened up. I also wrote that I didn't think we would be able to run macOS apps on M1 iPad Pros the way we can run iOS apps on M1 Macs; that's holding true so far, too. I'll note here, though, that the Hacker News crowd has specific ideas about What Makes a Real Computer that I don't think are widely shared by the non-engineer crowd, and that honestly a lot of you don't have a clear idea of how much automation and app interoperability is possible within iOS's restrictions. I prefer using the Mac, in no small part because I've been using Unix for close to three decades, but it's startling how much I'm able to do on the iPad even with its current nerfball limitations.
And, sure, the obvious objection is that "application console" is arbitrary, and it is. But isn't "game console" just as arbitrary? I mean, a PlayStation 5 has an 8-core CPU with 16GB of RAM; you can't develop software on it because Sony won't let you, full stop. We're more annoyed about that limitation being on the iPad because the arbitrariness feels more obvious, because we didn't buy the iPad "only" for gaming. But on a technical level, there's not a whole lot of difference.
The linked article makes the prediction that Apple is going to be trying to drive more and more people to the iPad and away from the Mac. I don't buy that, simply because the evidence just doesn't support it. They have literally just reported the strongest quarter of Mac sales in the company's history. It's not just that they're moving to their own CPU architecture, it's that they're in the process of rolling out new industrial designs for the entire Mac lineup. This is not what you do if your business goal is to have Mac sales taper off!
My feeling now remains the same as it did, er, all the way back in April: iPadOS and macOS are never going to merge. In the long run, there is going to be an operating system that replaces both of them, and the groundwork for that new OS is being laid out now. But it's not going to be here any time soon, and nobody (including me) should be making confident predictions about what that new OS will be -- what it will and won't do, what it will and won't allow, how locked down or open it will be.
