“It was as absolute an answer as you could possibly get,” Jason Snell writes for Macworld. “Is Apple merging iOS and macOS? ‘No,’ said Apple software chief Craig Federighi, with an animated accompaniment smashing down on the screen behind him.”
“And yet… Federighi made that comment just moments before he unveiled a new system, being worked on by Apple over multiple years, that will allow the developers of iOS apps to bring those apps to the Mac more easily,” Snell writes. “And first up will be Apple itself, which is using this approach to translate the iOS Stocks, Voice Memos, News, and Home apps for macOS Mojave, coming this fall.”
“While the Mac and iOS might not be merging, major changes are in store for the Mac and the apps it runs. It’s hard to imagine how the Mac of a couple of years hence isn’t populated with apps sourced from iOS,” Snell writes. “And yet, Apple says, the Mac will remain the Mac. What does that mean? What will define the Mac in 2020?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: These are Mac apps.
Their origin on iOS is meaningless to Mac-only users. They are macOS apps. New and plentiful macOS apps, no less. If these apps have a counterpart on iOS, so be it, but that’s neither here nor there as, once again: These are Mac apps.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
Hopefully Apple will split iTunes into the Music, Podcasts, video/TV apps and such as on iOS, and pretty please allow handoff for Music at least.
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You forgot iOS Apps Manager. Since that was ripped out of iTunes last year and no alternative is in sight.
The iPad.
We will have the macAR. A whole OS in Augmented Reality. Just put on the glasses. Not limited by pathetic screens anymore.
Why not directly inside the eyeball since people will become transhumans anyway?
In 2020 my Mac will look like my 2010 MacPro. Oh wait – it will be my 2010 MacPro.
Nice one! Jab at Apple and humor in one line. Kudos!
I am glad that Apple is making it easier for iOS developers to port their apps to the macOS. Some apps will greatly benefit greatly from that type of cross-platform availability with the mobile and desktop version of the app working together, letting each provide the functionality that suits that particular platform, or enabling handoff of work in-progress or finished work for some future manipulation. This is all good, and only possible because iOS and macOS share many code base features from OS X. If you listened to the WWDC, then you understand that this porting is primarily a matter of dealing with the user interfaces with the software, going from a smallish touchscreen to a keyboard, mouse, and trackpad environment. It is pretty much that simple.
Jason Snell has written some decent stuff. But he sometimes expounds on non-issues and ideas that are trumped-up, illogical fabrications.
Porting software from one computer platform to another is not all all equivalent to merging their operating systems. If it was, then everything would be merged by now. If so, then Windows would have merged with Mac when Adobe ported its originally Mac-only software decades ago.
This article by Snell is just filler, some words to earn a paycheck.
“Mountains out of molehills!” Could be the job description for pundits and whiners.
Apple will be out of the Mac game & focus on VR. That way, you can wear the goggles & pretend you’re working on that nice new 10 Core MacPro.
“iOS Pro” is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Despite Apple’s extreme focus on miniaturization, most productive work does not happen in a mobile environment. People need powerful machines at which they can sit in front of and concentrate.
Multiple large non-touch displays, local storage, convenient PERSONAL computing I/O & interoperability with all the peripherals that users have today would be the OBVIOUS attributes necessary for a useful modern computer. iOS devices fail on multiple fronts. What’s pathetic is that the newest Mac hardware is starting to lag big time on these attributes too. Nobody cares about shaving off mm each iteration.
Does anyone actually like the butterfly MacBook keyboards? Does Apple have any plan to reduce user dongle hell?
If Apple cares so much about user experience, why are they pushing subscriptions so hard?
Mac user since 1988.
iOS apps on Mac? ok
(yawn).
Phone apps: in practice they are trying to cram so many features in now that the interfaces are irritating, no consistency between apps. It violates the basic principal of interface design in terms of the question that the user must answer with their fingertip: Where do I go next?
3rd party or Apple iOS: no difference, still violating the basic principal, don’t know about Android but I assume its worse.
I regularly use 20% of my iOS apps, thats about all I can handle in terms of memorizing the meaning of vaguely designed non-communicative icons. The rest: I dread going there.
So how does Mac play into that? For me its: who cares about an iOS interface?
I make my living 6-12 using complex apps in web animation, pixel graphics and web with interfaces that are far, far, far beyond what could be handled in an iOS interface unless you have the ability to memorize the functions of hundreds or maybe thousands of icons. Difficult on the Mac, not much more difficult on the Windows version of the same app because the good programming decisions are made by the 3rd party devloper, OS doesnt matter in that regard. Either way,iff you don’t work on a particular app for a month, you have to do a 5-10 minute mental refresher course even in an app you have worked on for 15 years. Thats the nature of any complex app where you need to produce a complex product.
Those apps that I just described: impossible on iOS as we know it.
Yeah.maybe some Star Wars AI fantasy world using brain waves, laser beams shooting out of glasses to a 4×8 foot wall mounted projection; or God forbid: Siri. or the Google Amazon stuff.
AI? go over to Macintouch and go through the discussion thread on self-driving cars. For every problem that gets solved, another collision occurs just about every day that exposes a whole new set of problems that no one thought about yesterday, today is a new day. AI actually can’t program itself for a sitation that literally has never happened before unless its 99% similar. The human brain can.
I’m still on mouse and keyboard, brain to fingertip, the most efficient input ever.